By Oscar Ramos, Managing General Partner at Orbit Ventures
In many emerging markets, a broken phone for a delivery rider, merchant, freelancer, or student, is not just an inconvenience. It can mean losing access to income, payments, customers, education, or essential digital services.
Across Latin America, a significant share of consumers still rely on second-hand or refurbished devices as their primary access to the internet, while smartphone prices continue to outpace income growth for many households.
That is why we believe the next wave of digital inclusion won’t come from premium device upgrades. It will come from access to devices. That’s what Refurbi (Orbit 2025) solves through their platform for refurbished smartphones.
We’re proud to back Refurbi because while others see a marketplace for used phones – we see a critical layer for digital participation and access to opportunity for the rising middle class. Refurbi operates in a large and growing market where affordability remains the binding constraint.
But refurbishment is much harder than it looks.
We have invested and helped scale similar models across Asia and Africa — and we’ve seen a lot of competition fail. The difference between winning and losing is operational execution: precision across sourcing, grading, pricing, logistics, financing, and customer trust.
That’s where Refurbi stands out.
Before we invested, the company had already established leadership in Colombia and was expanding regionally, including into Mexico.
More importantly, Refurbi had already demonstrated meaningful early scale:
- sales growth of 4x over the last two years
- refurbishment infrastructure capable of processing up to 50,000 devices per month
- devices priced up to 60% lower than new equivalents, significantly expanding affordability for mass-market consumers
The company has also generated measurable environmental impact through extended device lifecycles:
- 3M kWh saved
- 150M liters of water contamination prevented
- 250 metric tons of CO2 emissions avoided
Founder and CEO Sebastián Jiménez Zuñiga demonstrated an unusually strong command of the operational mechanics behind the business, from sourcing and refurbishment workflows to unit economics and customer experience design.
In businesses like this, small operational improvements compound quickly:
- inventory turns
- defect rates
- sourcing efficiency
- financing approval rates
Those details become defensibility.
What also excites us is how emerging markets are increasingly learning from one another.
Refurbi is adapting proven refurbishment and re-commerce practices from Asia and localizing them for Latin America. This is not replication — it is iteration under different market constraints.
That matters because some of the strongest emerging market companies today are no longer building in isolation. They are building through shared operational learnings across regions:
- Asia’s supply chain efficiency
- Africa’s distribution innovation
- Latin America’s financing and access models
Within the Orbit Ventures ecosystem, this creates compounding advantages across sourcing, logistics, financing, and distribution partnerships.
But ultimately, the larger opportunity goes beyond devices.
Every affordable smartphone expands participation in the digital economy.
Refurbi contributes to measurable environmental benefits through extended device lifecycles and reduced electronic waste. But the more important impact is structural: enabling more people to work, learn, transact, and participate online.
Companies solving that challenge will look increasingly less like resale businesses — and more like operational infrastructure platforms for digital inclusion.
That’s why this category matters.
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