The founders of Akua like to describe what they're building as "acquiring-as-a-service"—industry shorthand that, admittedly, doesn't do much for the uninitiated. But dig a layer deeper, and what emerges is a bet that Latin America's payment infrastructure, long dominated by entrenched players and decades-old systems, is finally ready for disruption.
In early October, the Bogotá-based company closed an $8.5 million seed round, pushing its total raised to $13 million. Flourish Ventures and Cathay Latam co-led the investment, joined by Atlántico, Honey Island 4UM, Krealo (the venture arm of financial services giant Credicorp), Simma Capital, and a roster of returning backers: Propel Venture Partners, H2O Capital Innovation, Rally Cap VC, and Plug and Play. Gunderson Dettmer handled the legal work.
It's the kind of round that might ordinarily pass without much fanfare—mid-sized, well-syndicated, the usual suspects in LatAm fintech. Yet Akua's pitch touches on something particularly stubborn in the region's financial ecosystem: the infrastructure layer where card transactions are actually processed.
Rethinking the Pipes
Acquiring—the behind-the-scenes machinery that authorizes and settles card payments—has historically been the domain of legacy processors. In Colombia, for instance, names like Credibanco and Redeban have long held sway. Their systems work. They're reliable, after a fashion. They're also, in many cases, built on architecture that predates the smartphone era.
Akua's argument is straightforward: cloud-native infrastructure can do this faster, cheaper, and with more flexibility. The company offers APIs and white-label components to acquirers, payment facilitators, gateways, and aggregators—essentially positioning itself as the rails beneath the rails. Multi-rail card processing, pay-by-link functionality, tokenization, Tap to Phone capabilities. Real-time fraud detection powered by AI models. The works.
Whether that translates to a genuine competitive moat remains to be seen. The company claims its multi-datacenter setup can handle north of 50 million daily transactions with 99.999% uptime. That's five nines, for those keeping score—a reliability benchmark that would make most engineers nervous to promise in a press release. Akua says it's already secured certifications from both Visa and Mastercard, no small feat for a two-year-old startup.
The Team's Pedigree
If nothing else, the founding trio knows the space intimately.
CEO Carlos Marín cut his teeth at Mastercard and PayU before leading Pomelo's push into the Andean markets—a role that gave him a front-row seat to the inefficiencies baked into regional payment systems. Juan José Behrend, the CTO based in Uruguay, previously directed engineering at Pomelo and ran platform operations at dLocal, one of the region's most prominent cross-border payment processors. COO Rodrigo Rodrigues rounds out the leadership, bringing stints at Jeeves, Movii, and Mastercard, where he helped launch Movii's acquiring business in Colombia.
It's the sort of resume stack that venture capitalists love: operators who've seen the problem from multiple angles, worked at scale, and presumably learned where the bodies are buried.
What Comes Next
For now, Akua operates in Colombia and Uruguay. The fresh capital will bankroll expansion into Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and Central America—an ambitious geographic footprint, even allowing for the staggered rollout the company is likely planning. There's also the usual checklist: hire more engineers, onboard additional clients, scale operations without breaking what already works.
The company previously pulled in a $4.3 million pre-seed round last October, also led by Propel. A year between raises suggests momentum, though in venture-backed fintech, momentum and sustainability don't always travel together.
The broader question is whether Akua can deliver on the promise embedded in that "acquiring-as-a-service" framing. Infrastructure plays are notoriously difficult—high switching costs, entrenched relationships, regulatory complexities that vary wildly across borders. Latin America, for all its growth potential, remains fragmented in ways that don't always show up on a pitch deck.
Still, if there's a window, it's probably now. Legacy systems are creaking. Digital payments continue their relentless march across the region. And investors, at least for the moment, seem willing to back founders who think they can rewire the plumbing.
Whether Akua becomes the standard or just another well-funded attempt will depend, as always, on execution. The infrastructure is one thing. Getting merchants, acquirers, and partners to rip out what they know and trust?
That's another matter entirely.
