Andes raises ¥240M seed to build agentic commerce for Latin America

What's the deal? AndesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Tokyo-based startup building an "agentic commerce" platform for Latin America, has closed a seed round bringing its total to ¥240,000,000 (about $1.5 million).

Delight VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → led the round, with several angel investors joining. The funds will expand J-Planet, Andes' cross-border e-commerce service shipping Japanese and Korean goods to Brazil.

Why now? McKinsey QuantumBlack projects AI agents will mediate $3 to $5 trillion in consumer transactions globally by 2030.

Andes argues Brazil is the first market ready for it. WhatsApp reaches over 140 million users there, instant-payment system Pix is used by more than 90% of adults, and ChatGPT usage jumped 61% in a year to 44.9 million people.

Buying through conversation is already a habit in Brazil, so swapping a human seller for an AI agent demands little behaviour change. Visa found over 70% of Latin American consumers already use AI in purchasing.

J-Planet handles import taxes, customs, payment, and local delivery itself. As the only Japan-based platform certified under Brazil's simplified customs regime (PRC), it can ship qualifying goods at 0% import duty.

What could go wrong? Brazil is one of the world's hardest cross-border markets. Import taxes reach up to 60%, customs is slow, and product labelling faces strict local rules.

The wider model depends on AI shopping agents reaching mainstream use — still unproven. Andes also plans to open-source a "LATAM Agentic Commerce Protocol" while keeping interoperability with the standard backed by OpenAI and Stripe, a complex bet on ecosystem adoption.

The signal: Delight Ventures — founded by DeNA's Tomoko Namba, who personally vetted this deal — is backing a bet that the hardest cross-border corridor in the world becomes viable precisely because it is hardest, with PRC certification and entrenched conversational commerce forming a moat US-focused rivals can't easily copy. For a startup Dealroom already tags as breakout stage, the ¥240 million seed is less about scale than about locking in regulatory and protocol positioning before agentic commerce arrives.

Read more: PR Times