Problem

Palomma tackles two linked problems in Latin American real estate. Property managers and developers need to collect rent, administration charges, housing installments, and utilities reliably, reconcile payments, and get paid faster, while conventional card acceptance costs merchants roughly 2–5% per transaction. Cheaper bank-to-bank payments have historically been difficult to use: existing flows require multiple checkout steps and experience about a 40% failure rate, are hard to make recurring, require manual or fraud-prone confirmation, and expose cryptic payment data that complicates reconciliation. The killer use case is therefore recurring rent collection—automating reminders, payment confirmation, reconciliation, and downstream disbursements for property managers. Palomma frames the opportunity around approximately $235 billion in rental flows from tenants and landlords.

Product / Service

Palomma combines vertical AI agents with a payments platform. Its current Palomma Pay product is designed to collect and pay rent, administration fees, housing installments, and utilities automatically, using AI for WhatsApp-based collection, real-time portfolio analytics, reconciliation, and payments to owners, administrators, and service providers. The company also offers specialized agents for collections, data analysis, and treasury operations, while its earlier payments product was positioned as a single API and platform for frictionless Pay by Bank payments, initially in Colombia.

The benefit is a more economical and operationally reliable alternative to card-heavy collection workflows: Palomma says frictionless Pay by Bank can improve conversion by 30–40%, while its YC launch description says merchants can save 70–80% on card-processing costs. The platform is also intended to support recurring bank payments, instant confirmation through a dashboard and WhatsApp or email notifications, and clearer reconciliation.

Market

Palomma sits at the intersection of Latin American fintech, account-to-account or Pay by Bank payments, vertical property-management software, and AI automation for real estate. In Colombia, the adjacent payment-gateway competitive set includes Bold, PayU, ePayco, Mercado Pago, PlacetoPay, and Wompi; Palomma’s differentiation is its focus on real-estate workflows and its attempt to combine collections, treasury, analytics, and financial products rather than compete only as a general-purpose checkout gateway.

The company was founded in 2023, participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch, and is listed by YC as active with an eight-person team. Palomma’s current website claims that more than 500 real-estate companies trust Palomma Pay, indicating early commercial traction, although the corpus does not provide independently verified revenue or transaction-volume figures. Third-party funding databases report approximately $500,000 raised, so the best-supported characterization is an early-stage company with customer traction rather than a demonstrably revenue-scaled fintech.