Foundational Infrastructure for LatAm Fintech: Our Investment in Pismo

Today, we’re thrilled to announce we are leading the Series B in Pismo, the leading infrastructure provider for banking, card issuing and payments in LatAm.

Over the last few years, digital payments have rapidly accelerated across Latin America. For a historically underbanked population, with cash driving much of the economy (~80% of retail spend across the region), a few key trends have pushed the category forward. As the pandemic forced millions to transact online and open digital accounts, central banks like Brazil’s and Mexico’s wrote open banking laws into legislation that will serve as the backbone for the next generation of fintech innovators. 

We at Accel have been focused on partnering with founders providing the best in-class infrastructure to help those teams build fintech products. In the U.S., we partnered with Galileo (which served as the core banking-as-a-service and card issuing provider for companies like Chime, Robinhood, Transferwise, Varo, and Revolut) and, most recently, Unit. 

As LatAm experienced unprecedented fintech innovation over the last year, we searched for a similar platform that provides the “picks and shovels” for the largest banks and most discerning fintechs to deliver better financial products for the 650 million consumers and 30 million businesses across the region.

Enter Pismo: Pismo is the unified platform that gives product teams the tooling to build out accounts, card issuing, wallets, customer onboarding, spend controls, bill payments, fraud prevention, and so much more. Today, Pismo is powering millions of end-accounts for customers like Itaú, the largest bank in LatAm, Cora, a burgeoning business banking platform, Falabella, one of the largest e-retailers across the continent, and N26, the global mobile banking provider. As use cases across the fintech landscape continue to permutate, it has never been more crucial to build a seamless product experience, and we believe Pismo will power hundreds of incredible businesses to emerge in LatAm over the next decade. 

Our investment in Pismo also continues our commitment to LatAm, along with recent investments in Nuvemshop, Flink, Higo, Atrato, and others. It also expands our family of leading fintech infrastructure players globally, including Galileo, Drivewealth, Braintree, Orum, Unit, Xendit, Primer, Lightspeed and Socure (to name a few).

We have known Ricardo, Daniela, Juliana, and Marcelo for years, and they are uniquely qualified to build such an important foundational layer for LatAm fintech, given that they built Conductor (LatAm’s first payments & banking-as-a-service platform). As we did our work and spoke to the broader LatAm fintech ecosystem, many referenced their deep respect for the team; we heard more than a few times that they’re the “best technologists in Brazil”. 

After spending more time with them in Sao Paulo, we realized that was no understatement. Ricardo, Daniela, Juliana and Marcelo have the unique mix of unparalleled insight, rare humility, and clear vision that we have come to appreciate at Accel. They have been living and breathing this category for the last 20+ years, and we couldn’t be more excited to build towards its future together!

––David Waltcher, Ethan Choi, and John Locke