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- VC Mx: Mateo Creamer, Co-Founder, Cometa
VC Mx: Mateo Creamer, Co-Founder, Cometa
Mateo Creamer is the founder of Cometa, a startup improving access to quality education in Latin America.
Mack Meyer
June 24, 2025
In partnership with
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Mateo Creamer is the co-founder of Cometa, a company born from a deep belief in Latin America’s potential and a personal journey shaped by mentorship, resilience, and mission-driven work.
He never planned to be a founder. In fact, initially felt out of reach, something for people who thrived on risk. That changed after a conversation with Michael Martin, CEO of RapidSOS. “You’re going to be a founder one day,” Martin told him, and followed through by mentoring Mateo through business school and writing the first check into Cometa.
Some people wake up and know they’re meant to be founders. Others need someone to believe in them first.
Early Years
Mateo studied financial economics at Columbia University and started his career in investment banking. The experience was valuable but lacked purpose. That opportunity at RapidSOS, where he helped lead the company’s pivot from a consumer 911 app to a real-time data platform powering emergency response for companies like Apple, Uber, and Google.
When the company expanded into Mexico, Mateo volunteered, despite having no network or playbook. “You just figure it out,” he says. Working with governments and telecom giants in Latin America lit a spark that hasn’t left him since.
Rather than stay on a clear leadership path at a fast-growing startup, Mateo chose to step back and pursue an MBA to reset and build what would come next.
Takeaways from Duolingo
Before launching Cometa, Mateo Creamer interned on the monetization team at Duolingo, not drawn in by the memes or virality, but by the discipline behind the scenes.
It’s not as ROI-obsessed as you’d think. The marketing team didn’t need to prove immediate returns. They were trusted to build long-term value.
He observed how the product team focused on micro-optimizations while the brand team launched region-specific campaigns in Japan, Germany, and the US each one built from scratch.
Though he wasn’t on the marketing team, Mateo learned how mission and metrics could coexist, and how monetization, product, and brand could operate in sync, “if they spoke the same language.” It’s a lesson he brought with him to Cometa.
The Cometa Wedge
So what problem is most vital to Schools?
The Cometa founding team has made clear…
school’s collections.
Collections are the heart of a school. The academic side might be the brain, but if money stops flowing, nothing else matters.
Instead of selling a full-stack school ops system, Mateo and team solved the hardest, most painful problem first.
It worked.
Why? Because Cometa’s customers, mostly small, private school owners,are often former educators, not trained operators. They don’t want bells and whistles. They want cash flow and clarity.
Mateo knew this meant building trust before product depth.
So they kept things simple:
Help schools collect tuition
Make it easy for parents to pay
Build a dashboard that shows performance in real-time
Everything else followed from there.
Why Cometa?
The name Cometa holds deeper meaning than just “kite” in Spanish.
It’s both a kite and a comet, symbolic of students, momentum, and upward trajectory. It also plays on the idea of co-meta, collaborating toward a shared goal.
How Do You Build a Product-First Culture?
Mateo Creamer emphasized that many competitors in their space have a tendency to say “yes” too often to customer requests, resulting in bloated, clunky platforms. He and his co-founder Valeria, a highly respected product designer, have taken a different approach.
From the beginning, they aligned on a vision: build a product culture that challenges assumptions instead of blindly accommodating every sales or support request. While they work closely with B2B clients, their aim is not to replicate broken workflows, but to elevate and streamline school operations.
Our competitors often digitalize chaos. We push schools to rethink how they work. And that means sometimes saying no.
One key example?
Factoring. Early on, Cometa considered adding a factoring product due to demand. But they stepped back and decided it didn’t align with their mission of helping schools operate more efficiently. Instead, they redirected those clients to competitors.
If you want factoring, go to X. If you want to change how you work, come to us. And they usually come to us.
The internal product culture has spread beyond the product team. Sales reps now ask the deeper “why” behind requests. This allows Cometa to co-create better workflows with clients, leading to improved onboarding, stickier product adoption, and smarter development cycles.
The Power of Vertical Integration
Vertical integration is a tempting strategy, especially in a market like Mexico, but Mateo stressed the importance of pacing. Cometa’s early playbook focused entirely on building the best collections product in the country. Only after achieving that “right to win” did they begin expanding into new tools and services.
We think in phases. Phase 1 was collections. Now we’re in Phase 2, building new products. And we’ve always told our team, “wait for it, it’s coming.’
Mateo referenced companies like Toast in the U.S. as inspiration, platforms that started with a focused wedge and eventually expanded across the entire value chain.
Toast didn’t start with lending. They started in the kitchen. We think similarly. A school’s growth isn’t just about financial tools,it’s about every part of how they operate.
They’ve embedded this phased roadmap into their internal operations, clearly communicating to the team when each new chapter begins and what success looks like at that stage.
Putting Parents at the Forefront
While Cometa sells to schools, Mateo emphasized that the real end-user is the parent.
Your client’s client is the parent, right? So we’re selling to schools, but ultimately, you need to make the parents’ experience delightful.
Much of Cometa’s product design is built around shifting control to the parent while reducing the administrative burden for schools. For example, instead of relying on outdated data provided by schools, Cometa asks parents to re-enter their information during onboarding,improving accuracy and system-wide reliability.
This philosophy extends to features like invoicing. Previously, schools had to manually invoice parents after collecting student-specific billing data. Cometa removed that friction.
Now, a parent can change their invoicing data whenever they want. Even if they still pay at the school, we handle the invoice. The school doesn’t have to touch any of it.
How Cometa Makes Money
Cometa uses a dual revenue model: SaaS + payments. Mateo explained the rationale:
SaaS ensures Cometa is seen as a software company,not just a payments provider.
Payments align revenue with value: Cometa only makes money when parents pay through the platform.
If a parent pays in cash and the school’s fine with that, we still support the school. But when payments go through Cometa, the process is far more efficient, no manual invoicing, no reconciliation headaches.
While upselling isn’t a current focus, the team is working on expanding their footprint within each school, deeper integrations, more control points, more usage. Mateo hinted that future monetization opportunities will emerge from these deeper touchpoints.
Who Is Cometa Really Built For?
In product, you have to be precise. If you start building for everyone, your core customer will feel it, and you lose the seamlessness that makes you great.
Cometa is built for K-12 private schools, where the buyer is usually the parent, not the student. From elementary through high school, the product works consistently. Things only start to change at the edges, like pre-K or university, where payment dynamics shift and the product needs to adapt.
Rather than chase every opportunity, the team doubled down on their core customer. That clarity has helped them build something that feels intuitive from day one.
I always ask founders: what problem are you solving? Not what’s your idea,because the idea is going to change. The problem should stay the same if you’re passionate.
Cometa’s mission,expanding access to quality education in Latin America has never wavered. The vision has evolved. What started as a tool to ease financial strain is now growing into something bigger.
Now we want to be the operating system for the school. That’s how we believe we’ll truly achieve our mission.
VC Fundraising & Choosing the Right Partners
Last fall, Cometa announced a $12M Series A led by Kaszek, Reach Capital, Homebrew, Acrew, and Latitud,arguably one of the strongest cap tables in Latin America.
Mateo reflected on the journey:
In both our rounds, we were preempted. Investors told us they were ready for us before we were technically ‘ready’ to raise. That kind of conviction meant a lot. We didn’t necessarily take the highest term sheets. We prioritized partners who challenged us, who believed in our vision, and who brought real operating experience to the table.
He pointed out the value of working with funds like Reach, Kaszek, Homebrew, and Latitud since day zero, and how Acrew brought deep vertical SaaS expertise from the moment they joined.
It quickly flipped from them interviewing us to us interviewing them. We were just that excited about what they could bring to the table.
Why Education + Fintech Was Underserved
Why has financial infrastructure in education been so overlooked in Mexico and the region?
Fintech only took off in the last decade. You needed players like Nubank and Xepelin to prove there was gold in broader markets before niche verticals like ours got attention.
He believes markets like education are massive and ripe for a “winner-take-all” outcome.
We do think this is a winner-take-all category. If you want to become the operating system for schools, you have to think long-term. That’s always been our mindset.
The Feature He’s Most Proud Of
When asked what feature he’s most proud of, Mateo didn’t hesitate.
The Delinquency Efficiency Report. It wasn’t built by the founding team. One of our squads uncovered it by interviewing advanced schools. They found this highly sophisticated report format with conditional formatting and ranges, and reimagined it for small and mid-sized schools. Every school owner we showed it to was like, ‘Wow.’ It’s simple but powerful, and that’s the culture we want to build.
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