Paradigm leads $9M Series A for El Dorado, backing Tempo-based LatAm cross-border rails

Paradigm has led a $9 million Series A financing round in Latin American cross-border payments app El Dorado, with Coinbase Ventures and Verda Ventures also participating, the companies told The Block. El Dorado, founded in 2022, says it has more than 100,000 active users and has processed over 5 million transactions across 12 countries.

Paradigm partner Ricardo de Arruda framed the opportunity in regional payments infrastructure. “Cross-border payments in Latin America represent one of the most underserved and underreported opportunities in global finance,” he told The Block. “The region moves well over $100 billion across borders annually, but is plagued by slow, expensive and opaque infrastructure. El Dorado is building the payments layer this market has long needed.”

Co-founder and CEO Guillermo Goncalvez put the LatAm cross-border payment market closer to $1 trillion per year and said legacy rails do not match current demand. “That's mostly U.S. into LatAm volumes, and about 60% of that is actually purely B2B cross-boarder payments, so mostly imports and exports,” he said, adding that El Dorado is seeing a “biggest underserved opportunity” in internal corridors such as Brazil–Bolivia that larger fintechs like Nubank and Wise largely ignore.

Alongside the raise, El Dorado launched a business unit aimed at Latin American companies executing cross-border payments and multinationals entering the region. The product combines multi-sig and multi-organization structures and integrates stablecoin and fiat rails into a single application, with over 100 new business clients onboarded so far, mainly for importing electric vehicles from China.

The new business payments service runs on Tempo, a Layer 1 blockchain incubated by Paradigm and Stripe. “Money should move the way the internet does. El Dorado is among the first to launch business accounts on Tempo that any company in the world can open, with or without a U.S. entity,” said Josh Itzkovitz, GTM at Tempo. The deal ties Paradigm’s venture bet directly to early Tempo infrastructure adoption in a region where cross-border volumes are large and payment rails remain fragmented.