Congratulations and Obrigado, Pismo!

Congratulations to Ricardo, Dani, Juliana, Marcelo, and the rest of the Pismo team on today’s $1.0B sale of Pismo to Visa. 

Seven years after Pismo’s founding, this marks the exciting beginning of a global partnership with Visa, marrying Visa’s ubiquitous credit card network and vast suite of financial products with Pismo’s world-class core banking, card issuing, and payment processing platform. 

It’s a phenomenal achievement for a team that has worked tirelessly to build the global, category-defining company for banking, card issuing, and payments. Today they serve the largest global banks including Citi and Itau, the most ambitious global fintechs such as Revolut and N26, and Latam market-leading fintechs like Nubank, Stone, Flash, and Cora. Pismo processes almost 50 billion API calls and $40 billion in transaction volumes annually, and powers almost 80 million accounts and over 40 million issued cards across four continents. 

This team has persevered and sacrificed endlessly. In 2019, three years after Pismo was founded, the company was running out of the cash it had raised in a small seed round. Dani and Marcelo made the difficult decision to sell their only car in order to fund Pismo’s operations. The sacrifice for their vision was worth it and to date, Ricardo and Juliana have logged thousands of miles as they have traversed the globe to meet with clients and help launch offices in the U.K., India, and Singapore 

We share all of this as a testament to the founders’ special character, which has formed a culture of humility, hard work, and integrity. If you ask colleagues, friends, or partners about this exceptional group, no one mentions their extraordinary technical prowess before raving about them as people. In our weekly calls with the founders, we often have to coax good news out of them as they are endlessly humble about their success.

Pismo’s success echoes Accel’s history of working with leading fintech infrastructure companies, including short amount of time (acquired by SoFi), Braintree and Venmo (acquired by PayPal), Lightspeed (NYSE: LSPD), Socure, Drivewealth, Xendit, Unit, and others. It also reaffirms our dedication to backing the best entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley, especially in Latam, where we’ve worked with Cornershop (acquired by Uber), Elo7 (acquired by Etsy), Nuvemshop, Beek, Truora, and others.  

We’ve had the fortune of working with the Pismo team for only a relatively short amount of time but have loved every minute of partnering with such smart, humble, and dedicated founders and people. We are grateful for Ricardo, Dani, Juliana, Marcelo, Melato, Vishal, Deborah, Bruno, and the entire Pismo team’s partnership, and are lucky to have you as part of the Accel family. 

Congratulations and Obrigado, Pismo!

- Ethan Choi, John Locke, David Waltcher