Why we invested in Autority

… And what Marty and Doc Brown have to do with it

When we founded 5Eyes, one of our first decisions was to invest primarily in Israeli companies. We felt that Israeli innovation combined with our local network gives us an unfair advantage in terms of choosing the best and brightest startups to invest in. While I am still a big believer in this thesis, Autority was our greatest exception to this so far.

So how did we end up investing in a company from Ecuador? That is a good question. 4 years ago, an Ecuadorian startup named Kriptos decided to apply and participate in Techstars Tel Aviv program in order to get the full experience of The Startup Nation. The experience of this company led to the founders recommending the Tel Aviv program to their entrepreneur friends leading to a chain of Ecuadorian companies applying to join as well. One such company was Autority.

As a Mentor in Residence for the cohort that Autority participated in, I saw an incredible trio of founders in Juan, Diego and Guillermo. They combined all required entrepreneur qualities including big vision, resilience, tenacity, work ethics, optimism without a trace of ego whatsoever. Throughout the program, I had the privilege of supporting this team’s ambitious goal of making all car related payments in Latin America fully digital. My partners and I could immediately tell that this team is going to revolutionize the lives of every car owner in Latin America by spearheading the digital transformation of an entire industry, in a HUGE continent.

So what does Autority actually do? it is a super app used by vehicle owners across LatAm to facilitate all of their car related payments. Although most car payments are already credit card and app based in the US, Europe, and Israel, Latin America is lagging behind on this front. I can still remember the first time I heard Juan (CEO of Autority) tell me how he got a speeding ticket for his wife over email but had to actually head over to the bank to pay it in cash. When one of my partners heard that story, he immediately claimed that it felt like a scene from “Back to the future”. He kept hammering about he felt like Marty Mcfly in Doc Brown’s time-traveling Delorean, going back 15 years armed with the knowledge and skills from the future of car payments. We can take this company, industry and continent into the future. Which is our present. We can give these founders an unprecedented advantage.

Here is why we chose to invest in Autority:

• Market: 200m cars, 70b transactions amounting to $400b annually.
• Traction: impressive revenue for an early stage company with the GMV growing by 50% MoM
• Founder market fit: Great team and founders with past exits.

Anybody else would have been happy with those 3 markers, but we have something even more powerful; the playbook to the future.

Being from Israel we know what the future of fintech companies in the vehicle space looks like, we lived through the rise of companies like Pango (valued at hundreds of millions of dollars), Moovit (sold to Intel for $1B), Waze (Sold to Google for $1B) and many more, and we have the playbook.

With LatAm startups growing an exponential rate as each year brings more and more new unicorns to that region, we are sure that Autority’s path will very soon lead it to that coveted status.

Vamos Vamos Autority