Everything started with a row. In 2014, one of the founding partners of ZeroQ had to ask for work in the morning to go pay a fine at the municipality. He took out his number, did a mental calculation, went for a walk and when he came back, his number had passed. The supervisor told her something that was key: “This happens to everyone.” That’s where the idea was born.
Xania Pantoja, co-founder of ZeroQ, remembers that moment as the click that changed everything. Together with Ernesto Erdmann and Sergio Abogabir, they began to build what would first be an application to monitor shifts from the cell phone and, over time, a complete customer service management platform. Today, more than a decade later, ZeroQ operates in Chile, Peru and Colombia, raised capital on the Santiago Stock Exchange and is in a more ambitious regional expansion process than ever.
ZeroQ: The jump to the stock market and what came after
When ZeroQ evaluated how to raise capital, the answer was not a venture capital fund. The company had been growing between 30% and 35% annually, with positive cash and without burning capital. A profile that ventures do not value as much, but that institutional investors do.
“What a venture wants is 60 or 80% growth, doubling, killing or dying. Not us. We were growing fast enough without risking dying,” explains Pantoja. This is how ZeroQ decided to open itself to the Santiago Stock Exchange, becoming one of the few Chilean technology startups to take that path.
The process was demanding. The stock exchange requires auditing and professionalization standards that force the house to be organized in a rigorous manner. “It was super hard, but it helped us stand up in a different way in front of the largest clients,” Pantoja acknowledges. The capital raised was not to survive, but to grow faster and serve larger scale corporations, something that was previously difficult for them without the appropriate structure.
What they learned when opening countries
With that backing, ZeroQ began to test ground in Peru and Colombia. And there came the first blows of reality. The expansion was, in Pantoja’s words, “a kick and a combo”: trips, emails, craft meetings and hiring without a clear playbook. The result was wear, disorder and learning that today is redefining how the company wants to do things.
“We did it very similar to how we started in Chile, very artisanal. And we were already bigger. What we should have done is standardize the processes here first and then export them. Not make it so artisanal, because it was a waste of physical resources, and it was more disorderly,” mentions Xania Pantoja.
Each country also has its own idiosyncrasies. In Peru, customers take a while to respond, but when they arrive they do so with a purchase order. In Colombia, the meeting is warm and enthusiastic, but closing can take months. And in Peru, in addition, there is prior educational work: the market is somewhat more technologically backward, which requires preparing the ground before selling.
The focus for the next four years
Today, ZeroQ is building that playbook that was missing in the first expansion. The goal is clear: for Peru and Colombia to represent between 25% and 30% of the company’s total revenue in four years, with a projected growth of 90% annually in each market. It is not about lowering Chile, but about making the total grow.
The three priority verticals will be the same as those consolidated in Chile: health, financial services and regulated services. They are industries with a high flow of in-person attention, where managing people is critical and where ZeroQ has greater experience and traction.
“We were born as a technology company. The companies that were there before are hardware companies that have software. We are a software company that has hardware. The approach to solving the problem is very different,” analyzes Xania Pantoja.
Added to this is the commitment to artificial intelligence: ZeroQ developed an AI agent that integrates with its physical platform, allowing care to begin digitally and end in person, or vice versa. It is the step from selling totems to offering end-to-end solutions, the same change that the founder defines as the “transformational” moment that the company is experiencing today.
