Agencies and consulting firms are in the business of selling time, yet most can’t actually see where that time goes. The industry that measures everything from clicks to impressions has historically measured almost nothing about itself.
Solving this problem is why we’re excited to announce FTV’s $30 million investment in COR, the AI-powered management platform that gives agencies and professional services firms real-time visibility into the profitability of their projects, people and clients. According to COR research, 66% of agencies aren’t accurately mapping their time.
Today, leading organizations including DLA Piper, LLYC, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP rely on COR to answer the industry’s most fundamental questions: Where does our time go? Where are we actually making money?
A founder who lived the problem of agency profitability
Great software is usually built by someone who felt the pain firsthand, and COR CEO and Co-founder Santi Bibiloni felt it more acutely than most.
Santi previously founded Balloon Group, which became one of Argentina’s fastest-growing digital agencies with 400 clients across 12 countries before being acquired. Running that agency, Santi and his longtime partner, José Gettas (who is now COR co-founder and COO), discovered that the gap between hours sold and hours delivered is where agency margins disappear. Rather than accept that as the cost of doing business, they partnered with Gabriel Marin (COR co-founder and CTO) to build the solution they needed themselves.
Since COR’s founding in 2017, the company has become the system of record for profitability for agencies and professional services firms around the world. The platform automates one of the industry’s most burdensome tasks, time tracking, and transforms it into a real-time view of project economics, team capacity and client profitability. That intelligence helps firms scope projects more accurately, improve utilization, reduce rework and ultimately increase margins while reducing employee burnout.
From tracking hours to managing AI agents
The billable hour, which is the foundation of the services business model, is now being upended by AI. Agencies are rapidly deploying AI tools across creative production, media and strategy, and most have no idea whether those tools are making them more profitable or less. Every AI tool, agent and hybrid human-AI workflow introduces new costs, new delivery models and new operational complexity that legacy project management software was never designed to measure.
COR is already built for this transition.
Because it captures where time, resources and costs actually flow, COR is naturally positioned to become the control tower for agencies managing both human and AI workforces. We believe the platform can become the system that orchestrates work, measures profitability and flags margin risk before it happens.
As our team wrote in FTV’s 2026 predictions, AI agents are the new UX layer in vertical software, and the winners will be the platforms that pair deep domain workflows with proprietary operational data. COR sits squarely at that intersection.
A proven track record in Latin America
This investment also bolsters one of FTV’s long-held convictions: that Latin America produces world-class technology companies. We invested in Globant in 2008 and watched it become the first Latin American software company to IPO on the NYSE in 2014. We were the first institutional investor in EBANX in 2017, which reached unicorn status two years later and has become a dominant player in cross-border payments.
And we’ve invested across the region in companies such as VórtxVórtx and Lean Solutions Group, expanding our footprint in Latin America. COR, founded in Buenos Aires and serving customers globally, is the latest chapter in that story.
Partnering for the next phase of growth
COR is emblematic of what we set out to do with FTV Ascend I, our newest fund dedicated to check sizes of $20 to $60 million. FTV Ascend applies the same thematic, sector-focused investing approach FTV has honed over nearly three decades to a new crop of companies, and COR is exactly the type of business the strategy was built to back.
As with every FTV partnership, our commitment goes beyond capital. We look forward to opening doors for COR through our Global Partner Network®, supporting the team’s scaling with our in-house operations group, FTV Propel®, and helping accelerate the company’s expansion in Latin America, the U.S. and Europe.
Congratulations to Santi, José, Gabi and the entire COR team. We could not be more excited to partner with you as you build the operating system for the next generation of creative and professional work.
