Gastón Irigoyen is co-founder and chief executive of Pomelo, a Buenos Aires company that offers card issuing, processing, and BIN sponsorship to fintechs and banks across Latin America. He started it in 2021 with Hernán Corral and Juan Fantoni.
Three Countries and a Crisis
Irigoyen was born in Switzerland, spent four years in Peru, and grew up in Buenos Aires, where he lived through Argentina’s hyperinflation. He studied international relations at the Universidad de San Andrés, where he later taught. “In many ways, we are trying to solve some of those structural issues that I saw firsthand growing up in the region,” he says.
In 2006 he became one of the first Latin American employees at Google, helping build its operation in the region and later working on monetizing YouTube from Ireland.
Founder and Operator
From 2012 he built two companies. He was chief business officer at Restorando, the restaurant booking site that was sold to TripAdvisor, and chief executive of Guidecentral, which was acquired by wikiHow. In 2019 he became the first chief executive of Naranja X, the digital finance arm of one of Argentina’s largest card issuers, and left in 2020.
Pomelo came next. Its first goal was modest: in 2021 the team wanted to buy Christmas gifts with cards issued on their own platform. That May it raised a $9 million seed round from Index Ventures and monashees.
Scaling Across the Region
Pomelo now has country managers in Mexico, Brazil, and the Southern Cone and says it processes billions of dollars in payment volume. In January 2026 Kaszek and Insight Partners co-led its $55 million Series C, bringing the total raised to $160 million. It competes with Paymentology and Marqeta. Irigoyen is an Endeavor Entrepreneur and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.
