Sharpi, a Brazilian software startup, announced Wednesday it had closed a $4 million seed round co-led by NXTP and ONEVC, with Clocktower Ventures and MAYA Capital joining the deal. The two-year-old company has built something that sounds almost too pragmatic to be venture-worthy: it converts the flood of WhatsApp messages that fill sales reps' phones across Latin America into structured orders that flow directly into enterprise software.
The financing brings Sharpi's total funding to approximately $5.2 million, according to Brazilian tech publication Startups.com.br. The company had previously closed a pre-seed round led by MAYA Capital in November 2025, with most sources reporting the deal at $1.2 million, though at least one outlet cited $1 million. That earlier round drew backing from a roster of Brazilian tech veterans, including André Street of Stone, Mariano Gomide and Geraldo Thomaz of VTEX, and Guilherme Bonifácio of iFood.
At its core, Sharpi is betting on a behavior pattern that defines how commerce actually happens in much of Latin America. While enterprise software vendors have spent decades trying to impose structured data entry on sales teams, Brazilian distributors and manufacturers have simply continued doing business the way they always have: over WhatsApp. Sales reps receive orders as voice memos recorded in noisy warehouses, as photos of hand-scrawled lists, as PDFs forwarded from procurement departments, or as spreadsheets with inconsistent formatting. Sharpi's software ingests all of it.
The platform uses AI to parse those messages, extracting product codes, quantities, and pricing details before writing them directly into ERP systems including SAP, TOTVS, Sankhya, Tiny, Omie, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics. Sharpi claims the technology reduces order processing time from as much as eight hours to around 30 minutes, though those figures presumably vary considerably depending on order complexity and existing workflows.
Beyond transcription, the software suggests complementary products, flags dormant customer accounts for reactivation, and automates follow-up messages for manufacturers running promotional campaigns. Sales managers gain a consolidated view of conversations that otherwise remain scattered across individual WhatsApp threads, along with real-time visibility into lost sales or inventory shortages.
The numbers suggest Sharpi has tapped into genuine demand. The company said its customer base expanded from roughly six clients early in 2025 to more than 20 active accounts by late August. Its client roster includes Mantiqueira Brasil, Bold Snacks, Bidfood, Cayena, Rio Quality, Disdal, Nilo Tozzo, and Casas Pedro, according to press reports. As of late August 2026, Sharpi reported processing over 2 billion reais in transaction volume and booking $720,000 in contracted annual recurring revenue. The company has set an ambitious target of $8 million in ARR by the end of 2027, Startups.com.br reported.
That growth trajectory reflects a broader reality about how business gets done in the region. A survey conducted by Brazil's Sebrae news agency and published on October 17, 2025 found that WhatsApp served as the primary communication channel for 80 percent of service businesses. Separately, the national retailers' confederation CNDL/SPC Brasil reported in November 2024 that 67 percent of Brazilian commerce and service companies conduct sales mainly through the messaging platform. For context, that penetration rate exceeds WhatsApp's commercial usage in most developed markets by a considerable margin.
CEO Kim Rawicz, now 24, co-founded Sharpi in 2023 alongside CTO Alexandre Philippi. Rawicz studied gastronomy at Le Cordon Bleu and operated food businesses before launching the startup, an origin story he traces to watching restaurants default to WhatsApp-based ordering despite having access to more sophisticated tools, according to an interview with Brazilian outlet Exame. Philippi arrived with credentials from Apple's Developer Academy and a collection of hackathon awards.
The company plans to channel the new capital toward what Rawicz describes as "a new generation of autonomous AI agents" for demand generation, order processing, and customer reactivation. Currently, Sharpi functions as a copilot requiring human validation before finalizing orders. "Our main objective by the end of this year is delivery," Rawicz said in an interview published in late August, though he did not specify whether that timeline referred to full automation or expanded product capabilities. Sharpi intends to grow its engineering team over the next six months while adding sales and operations personnel, according to Startups.com.br.
The company faces competition from several directions. Mexico-based Yalo has built conversational commerce infrastructure at enterprise scale, working with major distributors including Coca-Cola FEMSA and CCU. Argentina's Galo AI offers similar WhatsApp-to-ERP order capture, converting messages into validated records for logistics and billing systems. Brazil's Zenvia, a Meta Business Partner, provides WhatsApp messaging and multi-agent routing with CRM and ERP connectors, though it positions itself as a broader customer experience platform rather than a specialized order-processing tool.
Sharpi also participated in an EMBRAPII research initiative listed in April 2025 under the title "LLM4Orders," which applied large language models to structuring orders and quotes from messaging platforms. That academic pedigree may prove useful as the company attempts to differentiate its technology in an increasingly crowded field.
"We believe in empowering salespeople," Rawicz told Startups.com.br, framing the company's mission as closing performance gaps through technology while maintaining human relationships in the sales process. Whether that philosophy can scale profitably in a region where WhatsApp has become commercial infrastructure remains the open question investors are now backing Sharpi to answer.
