Paradigm has led a $9 million Series A financing round in the Latin American cross-borders payment app El Dorado, the companies said Monday.

"Cross-border payments in Latin America represent one of the most underserved and underreported opportunities in global finance," Ricardo de Arruda, a partner in investing and research for Paradigm, 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."

Coinbase Ventures and Verda Ventures also participated in the round.

El Dorado co-founder and CEO Guillermo Goncalvez put the cross-border payment market in Latin America closer to $1 trillion per year and yet the region lacks the effective payment rails needed, he said.

"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," Goncalvez told The Block. "Something pretty interesting that we're seeing at El Dorado is that the biggest underserved opportunity relies on some internal corridors."

Currently, Goncalvez said one of its biggest payment corridors today is between Brazil and Bolivia."We're covering a bunch of these internal corridors that none of the other big companies are serving," he added.

Bigger fintechs like Nubank and Wise are not as focused on serving nations like Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador and Peru, according to Goncalvez.

El Dorado was founded in 2022 by Latin American immigrants with firsthand experience dealing with cross-border payments. The company has over 100,000 active users and has processed more than 5 million transactions, El Dorado said.

The company has also launched a business unit crafted to assist both Latin American businesses needing to execute cross-border payments and multinational companies wishing to do business in Latin America. El Dorado said its new offering combines multi-sig and multi-organization structures that integrates stablecoin and fiat rails into a single application.

Goncalvez said El Dorado has onboarded over 100 new business clients and the main use has been for the importing of electric vehicles from China.

El Dorado's new business payments service are built on Tempo, the 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.

In total, El Dorado said it operates in 12 countries including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Ecuador.