Santiago Bibiloni, the Argentine software entrepreneur who wants to organize agencies around the world

For eight months, he paid his team’s salaries without paying himself a cent. The office was a windowless storage space in the Once neighborhood, and he spent a year and a half there. He was twenty-one or twenty-two, had never received financial help from his parents, and that first venture was not yet the one that would work out. Almost twenty years later, the company he founded with two partners has just received $30 million from a U.S. fund that manages more than $10.2 billion, has clients in 38 countries and has counted Marcos Galperín among its shareholders since day one.

The first project, the one that did not work

The story Bibiloni tells when asked about his beginnings is not the story of Balloon Group. It is the one before that.

A storage space in Once, without windows or ventilation. A year and a half inside it. Eight consecutive months paying salaries while taking nothing himself. No family safety net behind him.

He sums up that period in a single phrase: he had to fight for everything, one hundred percent.

That project fell by the wayside. What came next, with more experience behind him, was Balloon Group, an e-commerce-focused marketing agency he founded at 21 and which José Gettas later joined as a partner. That one worked: it eventually had four hundred clients across twelve countries.

They sold it together.

What they discovered by selling hours

The origin of COR was not an idea developed in a laboratory, but a problem they experienced themselves.

While running an agency, Bibiloni, Gettas and Gabriel Marin encountered an issue that came up every month and that none of the tools on the market could solve. They tried the best-known project-management platforms —the ones used by half the world— and none of them answered the question that actually mattered.

His diagnosis is fairly straightforward: in the business of billable hours, the main problem is not managing projects. It is knowing whether each project makes money.

An agency can have a full schedule, busy teams and happy clients while losing money on three out of every ten jobs without realizing it until the end of the financial year. What was missing was the ability to measure that in real time, project by project and person by person.

They built COR around that gap in 2017, with Marin leading the technological development from day one.

Moving to the mecca

At 27, Bibiloni moved to San Francisco with his girlfriend to build a global company. His explanation was practical: if the problem they were solving was global, they had to tackle it from the place where that game was being played.

He did not romanticize the decision. He said plainly that competing in Silicon Valley against giant companies, while being Latin American, is extremely difficult.

The first investor was Marcos Galperín, who backed COR when it was still an early-stage startup, long before the company had an international presence. The funds came later.

In the 2019 round, worth around $2 million, they brought in the fund of Kevin O’Connor, founder of DoubleClick —the largest company Google had acquired in its history— who also joined the board as co-director. Yahoo’s former head of global operations also joined.

In 2021, they raised another $6 million.

July 2026: thirty million and a change of scale

On July 28, 2026, COR announced a $30 million investment led by FTV Capital, a fund specializing in enterprise software and financial technology that manages more than $10.2 billion and has invested in more than 150 technology companies.

The announcement was made from San Francisco and São Paulo.

The figures behind the deal explain why a fund of that size came to the table: COR closed 2025 with 51% year-over-year revenue growth, profitability and strong customer retention. That is not the usual combination in the startup world, where for years companies were allowed to grow while losing money.

Today, the platform is used by thousands of teams in 38 countries, with clients including Globant, Publicis Groupe, GUT and Sancho BBDO. Alex Malvone and Tommy Tighe also joined the board.

The money has three destinations: accelerating artificial-intelligence capabilities, entering new professional-services verticals —consulting firms, law firms and accounting firms— and deepening international expansion.

The bet that defines the next stage

The argument Bibiloni made when announcing the round is the most interesting thing he has said in years, because it is not about the company’s past but about the change coming to its industry.

His view is that for a long time the challenge for service companies was coordinating people. Now the challenge is becoming one of coordinating people and artificial-intelligence agents at the same time, without losing sight of whether each project remains profitable.

He argues that this change will redefine how service businesses operate and that COR was built for that environment. His stated ambition is for the company to become the operating system for this new generation of businesses.

It is a risky bet, and that is worth pointing out. If artificial intelligence reduces the number of hours an agency needs to bill, the entire hourly billing model comes under review. Bibiloni does not avoid the issue: his answer is that this is precisely why profitability needs to be measured more accurately, not less.

The part that is usually left out

It is worth pausing on the contrast, because that is what makes this story different from others in the same industry.

Bibiloni did not arrive in Silicon Valley through a postgraduate degree or an accelerator. He arrived after a failure in which he financed other people’s salaries from his own empty pocket, in a place without windows, at the age of twenty-one.

That experience left visible marks on the way he built the next company. COR grew without indiscriminately burning capital and reached its large funding round while profitable, giving the founders a negotiating position that few Latin American startups achieve.

It also explains something about the way he talks. When asked about the future, he often says that he does not intend to die having built only one company, that he carries the entrepreneurial gene inside him.

For now, however, things are at a fairly concrete stage. A piece of software that began by solving the frustration of three partners with their own agency ended up measuring the profitability of thousands of teams across 38 countries.

And the man running it, twenty years ago, could not even afford to pay himself a salary.