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▶ 22:01 · $DATABRICKS · Addi partnered with Databricks 5 years ago to vectorize events in real time
episode briefing
a16z

Building Enduring Companies Outside Silicon Valley | Santiago Suárez of Addi

2026-06-17 · 6 company · 0 thematic
sentiment
5 bull0 bear1 neu
speakers
santiago suarez

Co-founder and CEO of Addi, a Latin American fintech company offering digital payments and consumer credit.

quote
“we generate over 10 million events per day. these event architectures we used Kafka for hours are brutal to query. So, that's why most people end up moving away from this. And again, 5 years ago now, we partnered with Databricks. So, what…”
—santiago suarez
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Suarez points to Kaspi as the blueprint: single-country focus and NPS as sole metric
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Addi serves 25% of Colombia with 200+ agents and resolves 80% of customer service without humans
Addi scaled to 3M consumers, 50K merchants, a banking license and 200+ agents in production. A mono-repo plus event sourcing plus Databricks stack built 5-7 years ago put them in…
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Suarez cites Anthropic's mono-repo as late validation of his architectural decision
Seven years ago, when microservices were the standard, Addi built on a mono-repo. Today Anthropic and Google run on mono-repos, which makes it easier for agents to read the entire…
$DATABRICKSbullish· mediumsantiago suarez
Addi partnered with Databricks 5 years ago to vectorize events in real time
Addi's decision to partner with Databricks five years ago to process 10M+ daily events in vector format was key to its leap into agents. Early validation of the Databricks stack f…
$ADDIbullish· high· possantiago suarez
Addi treats Latin American credit as a technology wedge
Addi's founder frames the company as a technology platform first, not just a lending business. The thesis is that strong customer economics and equity value compound from building…