Simón Borrero

Rappi began on a Bogotá street corner in 2015, where the founding team reportedly handed out free doughnuts to get passersby to download the app.¹ By 2024 it was operating in eleven countries with about 350,000 couriers. Simón Borrero is the co-founder and chief executive of Rappi, a Bogotá-based on-demand delivery and services platform that operates across Latin America. Rappi is often described as a super app: alongside restaurant and grocery delivery it runs a courier or errand service that will fetch almost anything, and it has expanded into financial services through RappiBank and into retail media and advertising. Its deliveries are carried out by a crowdsourced fleet of couriers the company calls RappiTenderos.

Background

Reliable personal biography on Borrero is thin in the public record. He is Colombian and based in Bogotá, Colombia. His birthplace, birth year, family details, and formal education are not documented in the sources reviewed here, and Rappi's own public profile of him has been noted as lacking this information. Because these details are unverified, they are left open rather than filled in by inference.

Getting started

Accounts of Borrero's work before Rappi diverge, and the record is not fully settled. One source describes him founding Imaginamos, a software and app development studio that grew to more than 300 employees. Another describes him founding Grability, a food and groceries company, as the direct precursor to Rappi. These accounts may both be accurate, describing a software studio followed by a grocery-focused venture, but the relationship between them has not been confirmed.

What the sources agree on is the founding insight. Borrero has said that users of his earlier food and grocery product wanted a broader suite of services than the product offered. He came to believe that Latin America was ready for a multi-category super app in the mold of Asian platforms such as Go-Jek and WeChat, rather than the single-vertical apps that dominated the United States.¹ Borrero's co-founders were Felipe Villamarín and Sebastián Mejía, and the company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2016 batch.

What he built

Rappi was founded in 2015 in Bogotá, with headquarters there and major offices in São Paulo and Mexico City. The company raised a $200 million round in August 2018 and reached unicorn status that year. In April 2019, SoftBank invested $1 billion, valuing Rappi at $3.5 billion.¹ Reporting on a later round in 2021 is inconsistent across sources: it raised roughly $500 million at a valuation of about $5.2 to $5.25 billion, with investors reportedly including T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, and Third Point. Cumulative funding has been reported at $1.7 billion, from backers including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SoftBank, DST Global, and Y Combinator.

By 2024 the company reported roughly 5,200 employees and about 350,000 couriers, with revenue of around $800 million for 2023 and operations spanning 11 countries. Its delivery markets include Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, with additional European entities recorded in Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. Rappi expanded its product range over time: in 2020 it moved into games, live sales, and music streaming; in 2021 it launched RappiBank in Mexico; in 2022 it was approved as a bank in Colombia and enabled crypto payments; and in September 2024 it acquired the artificial-intelligence company Fountain9. Recognition has followed the growth. Rappi appeared on Bloomberg's list of the 50 most influential of January 2019, Borrero received Colombia's Empresario del Año, or Businessman of the Year, award from the country's president in February 2019, and Rappi was named to the TIME100 Most Influential Companies in September 2024.¹

How he operates

Borrero has framed his thinking around the tension between growth and profitability. In interviews he has discussed how geographic density within a delivery zone drives unit economics, how many deliveries are needed to reach breakeven, and when a company should shift from capital-efficient growth to aggressive expansion, at times comparing the problem to scaling a chain of coffee shops.² He has also described an internal leadership shift after large capital raises, moving from a lean, scarcity-minded operating discipline toward managing an abundance of capital responsibly. Borrero has offered a contrarian view that Uber Eats entering Latin America sharpened and improved Rappi's own operations rather than damaging them, and he cites Clayton Christensen's book The Prosperity Paradox as an influence.²

Where things stand

Borrero remains chief executive and an active operator, with Rappi positioned as a super app contender across Latin America and expanding into fintech, banking, and artificial-intelligence-driven retail media. As of September 2024, a co-founder stated that Rappi would be ready for an initial public offering within about a year; whether that co-founder was Borrero himself is not confirmed, and no offering has been reported as completed. The company also faces legal and reputational pressure. Borrero has been named as a defendant in a United States federal case, filed around September 2019, alleging misappropriation of trade secrets tied to a platform concept connecting users with errand-runners. Separately, Rappi has faced roughly 108 active consumer-protection lawsuits across jurisdictions, along with criticism of gig-worker conditions and a disputed report that it tied vaccine access to courier performance during the COVID-19 pandemic.³ These claims are contested and unresolved.

Key facts

• Rappi launched in 2015 on a Bogotá street corner, reportedly giving away free doughnuts to drive app downloads.
• The company went from Y Combinator's Winter 2016 batch to a $3.5 billion, SoftBank-backed valuation by April 2019.
• Cumulative funding has been reported at $1.7 billion, from backers including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SoftBank, DST Global, and Y Combinator.
• By 2024, Rappi reported roughly 350,000 couriers and about $800 million in revenue across 11 countries.
• Borrero received Colombia's presidential Businessman of the Year award in 2019, the same year he appeared on Bloomberg's 50 most influential list.
• Borrero has been named in a United States federal trade-secrets case and Rappi in roughly 108 consumer-protection suits, a tension against its growth narrative.