Akua, a Latin American payments startup founded by former executives at Mastercard, dLocal, PayU, Jeeves and Pomelo, has secured a $4.3 million seed investment led by Propel and supported by Plug and Play, HTwenty, RallyCap, Flourish Ventures and ICventures.
The capital will give Akua 28 months of runway with a team of 25 people. The company's acquiring infrastructure platform will launch in the first quarter of 2025, after eight months of development.
The core infrastructure will initially connect with Visa and Mastercard, to process card payments from both issuers and will later include other alternative payment methods.
The operation will kick off in Colombia, where it will compete with players such as Credibanco and Redeban, and it will expand to Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Brazil in the coming months.
Carlos Marín, CEO of Akua, who previously worked at PayU, Mastercard, and was until June the country manager for Colombia and Peru of the startup Pomelo, comments: “The payment landscape in Latin America is at a crucial turning point. Many businesses still use three-decade-old legacy systems that result in slow processing times and high fraud rates. Our value proposition is focused on how we can enable any payment rails — cards or non-cards — in the region.
"Once we start integrating all the payment methods, we can help our clients to process the transaction wherever the rail is more efficient from a cost perspective, but also more efficient in approval or fraud rates,"
Marin says the funding round was “oversubscribed” by $18 million in less than three months, but the founding team decided to stop at US$4.3 million.
“We talked to 80 funds in the process, and 20 came in. What the funds saw was a team of founders with a lot of experience,” says Marin.
The team includes Uruguayan Juan José Behrend (CTO), who helped build the technology in DLocal, Pomelo, and PedidosYa; and Brazilian Rodrigo Rodrigues (COO), who worked as an executive at Mastercard in Brazil, and led the global card operation for Jeeves.