Mikuy is the B2B trust layer that lets Peru's smallholders sell into the formal food channel — by aggregating supply and documenting delivery performance.
Peru's formal food service channel — hotels, restaurants, catering — is measurable and it is closed to small producers by arithmetic, not by prejudice.
Distributors require ≥500 kg per week. A single smallholder in the Andean highlands produces a fraction of that. The threshold is not negotiable — it is how a distributor's logistics economics work.
And they take 20–35% of the final price. The farmer sells to a local collector for cash on the day, at roughly 20–30% below what the channel pays. Nobody is being cheated. There is simply no infrastructure to aggregate.
Source: Perfil del Canal HORECA — ADEX Consulting for MIDAGRI, on USDA-FAS (2023)
It brought signal to the countryside. The remaining gap is a different animal: there is no one to sell to, and no way to document what was sold. The gap moved from connectivity to transaction.
Law 31071 obliges state food programmes to buy from family farming. From 2025 the school-feeding programme awards extra tender points for it — but pushes the burden onto institutional suppliers who cannot find, aggregate or document dispersed smallholders. That is the missing piece.
Mikuy aggregates supply until it clears the buyer's minimum volume, and records what happened on every delivery.
Pool several producers into one order that meets the buyer's volume and specification.
Record delivery date, quantity ordered vs. conforming, and lot origin. This becomes an OTIF score per supplier.
Reference prices and demand signals, so both sides negotiate with the same information.
It runs on WhatsApp, and that is a distribution decision. Peru's food trade already happens there — we bring order to it rather than asking anyone to adopt a new habit. WhatsApp is the acquisition channel until the market digitises around us.
What we deliberately do not do: we never take ownership of inventory, we operate no fleet, we run no cold chain, and we never hold third-party funds. That is not modesty — it is the entire reason we can survive at small scale.
The government's own channel study is explicit, and it contradicts what every competitor in this market assumes.
“Price loses centrality against supplier reliability, continuity of supply, cold-chain compliance and logistics performance indicators (OTIF).”
— ADEX Consulting for MIDAGRI, HORECA channel study
So the defensible asset is the compliance record. Price data can be scraped in a week. A two-year history of on-time, in-full deliveries per producer can only be accumulated by operating. We start recording it on transaction one — in a spreadsheet, before any software exists.
And that record compounds into something larger. A farmer with 30 documented conforming deliveries is credit-assessable in a way they are not today — which matters in a country where 72.6% of micro-businesses have no credit access. Digital → Data → Capital, in that order, and not before.
Peru's regional governments deploy public funds into producer associations — equipment, post-harvest infrastructure, certifications. The 2026 potential across regional and local government exceeds S/ 1,700 million.
And then nobody measures whether those associations sold more. The funding instrument has no built-in outcome tracking, and the authorities are required to report results they have no way to produce.
Same OTIF and traceability layer. Same cost. A second customer who needs it for a completely different reason — and a distribution channel into the producer associations we need on the supply side.
Impact is not a slide here. It is the reason a public counterpart has a budget line to work with us, and the reason the supply side gets subsidised onboarding we don't have to pay for.
And it is structural, not stated. Our data stays on infrastructure we run inside Peru, and our payments layer is published open source. Building the engineering talent here is not philanthropy — it is how we staff this at a cost no foreign competitor can match.
The clearest read on execution risk is what a team has already built. Ours is a multi-tenant payments stack covering six countries, in active implementation.
Latin American wallets give small merchants no commercial API. YayaPay solves it from the other side: an Android app reads the wallet notification and confirms the payment in real time, through a multi-tenant backend.
Yape · Plin · Nequi · Daviplata · Pix · MercadoPago
The closest Peruvian precedent died partly from payment delay, and the US$271M failure had to show payment on screen to hold farmers. Instant, verifiable payment confirmation is the one thing this market has proven it cannot operate without — and it is already built.
It also closes the data loop: payment confirmed → delivery recorded → OTIF score, with no one having to report anything.
320 official documents ingested and machine-readable, with a producer registry recovered by OCR from scanned catalogues · three competitor binaries decompiled, validating our backlog against 257 production endpoints · the OTIF and traceability layer that is the actual product.
YayaPay is today deployed for machine activation; integrating it as Mikuy's settlement layer is a committed roadmap item, not a claim about current operations.
We open a single origin region and a single destination city. The corridor is the unit — and the unit is what replicates.
Corridor one: Puno → Lima. 207,942 registered producers at origin — twice the next Andean region — and 73,517 in the destination market. Anchor products are low-perishability by design: no cold chain, near-zero spoilage.
4–5 star hotels pay up to 40% more for certification or added value, on formal contracts with supplier homologation. That premium is exactly what a documented compliance record unlocks. Replication is corridor by corridor, the way city-by-city marketplaces scale.
Corridor two is chosen, not guessed. The test is where the same anchor products meet a buyer already homologating suppliers — which the channel study puts in Cusco and Arequipa. Same playbook, second instance: new origin against the same destination, or the same origin against a new city.
Three apps taken apart at binary level. Their revenue architecture and their cause of death are documented facts, not inference from press coverage.
| Kusikuy · Peru | Smattcom · Mexico | Frubana · LatAm | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status | Abandoned | Alive · 8 years | Closed 2025 · US$ 271M raised |
| Revenue lines | 1 — commission, plus one grant | 7 — membership-centric | Inventory margin, ~10–15% |
| Capital tied per transaction | None | None | Both ends — stock and buyer credit |
| What the binary showed | Died when the grant ended. Its farmer app never got adopted | Price is rationed to force subscription — the "free" tier is a funnel | 8 city backends, own fleet, proprietary credit book |
The public analysis of the survivor counted four revenue lines. The binary shows seven. That gap is the whole argument for doing this work: what a company says it charges for, and what its code charges for, are different documents.
Direct competition in Peru today is one WordPress site reselling wholesale produce with no traceability. The category is open — and now we know precisely which configuration survives eight years and which one burns a quarter of a billion dollars.
Why this way round. Supply is the hard side to acquire, so its barrier to entry must be zero. The buyer has the budget — a Lima restaurant spends S/ 4,825 a month on produce alone — and receives the greater value: time and certainty.
The region's best-funded comparable raised US$271 million and closed in 2025. We decompiled its app: eight city backends, a proprietary credit book, an owned fleet. It financed inventory and financed its buyers, on wholesale grocery margins — capital tied at both ends of every transaction.
We tie none. The surviving comparable in this market carries no inventory and has operated for eight years. Capital efficiency here is not caution; it is the only configuration that has ever worked.
We are pre-revenue by sequence, not by stage. We absorbed the development cost ourselves, without external capital.
Every phase has a kill criterion. If fewer than 5 of 10 transactions accept our pricing without renegotiation, we redesign or stop. That was written before we started.
The development risk is behind us. What is in front of us is distribution — and that is the risk this round is for.
Informatics engineering, studied and lived in Switzerland. Led mining project acquisition and structuring in Peru: plant purchase by public deed, joint-venture term sheets with Australian and British counterparties, and portfolio representation before institutional investors at Mines and Money London. Speaks five languages.
AI engineer, based in the United States, founder of a U.S.-incorporated company currently merging with the Peruvian entity. Leads product and the data layer.
Qualified as both accountant and lawyer. Owns corporate structure, cross-border governance and the compliance requirements that selling into the formal and public channel demands.
Metallurgical engineer. Owns field operations and the territorial relationship with producer associations.
Why this matters here: the binding constraint in this market is not code, it is trust on both sides at once — institutional buyers and rural producers. We already operate in both worlds.
FSMA Section 204 requires lot-level traceability records producible within 24 hours of an FDA request, and it binds foreign suppliers serving the U.S. market. Congress moved enforcement to 20 July 2028 — the date changed, the rule did not.
Most of Peru's export chain cannot produce those records today. We would not build them: lot, origin, dates and delivery evidence are the by-product of a transaction on our platform.
YayaPay integrates 11 wallets across six countries — in active implementation, not shipped. A corridor is a template, not a geography. One founder is already in the U.S.
Said plainly: today we export nothing. This is where the same infrastructure points.
We are raising US$ 250,000 in a pre-seed round to fund the validation phase and the first operating corridor.
Note what is not on this list: building the platform. That is already paid for.
Pattern recognition on marketplace unit economics, discipline on when to build versus assemble, and introductions into the food-service and impact-capital networks where a documented smallholder supply chain has strategic value.
Mikuy · de la chacra a la olla — from the field to the pot
Alejandro Malaga Cruz, CEO · a.malaga@peruinvestment.net · +51 925 038 820
peruinvestment.net