DEUNA, the commerce operating system that enables a 1-click checkout buying experience and an expanded sales network for e-commerce merchants, today announced it has raised a total of $37M including a $30M Series A round led by Activant Capital with participation from Valor Capital, Abstract Ventures, Acrew Capital, Upload Ventures (formerly Softbank Early Stage) as well as founders from Plaid, Kavak, Jeeves, Xepelin, iFood, R2, and others.
Founded in late 2020, DEUNA empowers e-commerce merchants to make online sales in LatAm quicker, easier and safer. Their commerce 3.0 operating system provides local merchants with an easy-to-use payments infrastructure that integrates into every major payments provider (PayPal, Kushki, Mercado Pago, etc), alternative payment methods popular in the region (Kueski, Aplazo, Oxxo, Baloto, etc) and provides access to a growing network of over 3 million users to drive sales and boost conversion. The platform also handles payment orchestration, payment processing, fraud prevention, and life cycle management based on actionable user real time analytics, all of which are critical to the success of e-commerce merchants in LatAm.
LatAm is one of the fastest-growing e-commerce market in the world, growing +30% each year. Historically, however, e-commerce in the region has been stunted by three key challenges: customer acceptance, conversion, and fraud. The solution to these challenges involves building a new commerce ecosystem, Commerce 3.0, which relies on integrated, API-driven tools that can tackle these three major bottlenecks and drive the ultimate user and seller experience. In LatAm, the market opportunity for building Commerce 3.0 players is much larger that of the US, where fraud technology and market acceptance have already matured.
“Our product will flip e-commerce in the region. We designed the first fully functional solution for vendors to truly enable a 1-click checkout experience. This is the front door to commerce 3.0 for our clients. DEUNA solves the conversion, fraud, and acceptance rate challenges with a single integration” says Jose Maria Serrano, co-founder of DEUNA.
Co-founders Roberto Enrique Kafati Santos and Jose Maria Serrano spent the last two years bootstrapping the business in stealth mode, building a next-generation technology to enable a superior buying experience with ~3X higher conversion rates. Having grown 120x last year, the company boasts big-brand clients, such as KFC, Pappos, Dunkin Donuts, for whom they are delivering up to 6X growth in online sales. The Series A comes off the back of a $7M seed round in October 2021.
“DEUNA’s one-click checkout will be a game changer for LatAm’s nearly $100bn e-commerce market, helping address the region’s lower payment acceptance rates, higher fraud rates, and lower card usage rates. We have been very impressed with Roberto and Jose Maria’s vision and experience as well as DEUNA’s traction to date. We’re excited to partner with them as they build the leading ecommerce infrastructure platform and network in the region.” - David Yang, Partner at Activant Capital