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BFD Expert Voices - Private Credit

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Akua, which runs acquiring infrastructure across Latin America, raised $8.5 million in seed funding, CEO Carlos Marín tells Axios Pro exclusively.

Why it matters: Latin American payment facilitators are seeking faster ways to launch cards and account-to-account payments.

Zoom in: Flourish Ventures and The Cathay Latam Fund led the round, which also included Atlántico, Krealo, Honey Island by 4UM, and Simma Capital.

The raise brings Akua's total funding to $13 million, about a year after its pre-seed round.

How it works: Akua provides a white-label acquiring-as-a-service platform that enables its customers to accept card and account-to-account payments in a single, cloud-native stack.

Its payments hub supports pay by link, tokenization, and Tap to Phone.

"Everything in Akua is API-first, and we even built our own model context protocol so teams can generate integration code against our APIs," Marín says.

Between the lines: The company also has more than 20 AI agents that automate chargebacks, onboarding, reconciliations, and other workflows.

It reports a 40%-60% reduction in work for clients' operations from those agents, benchmarked by comparing clients' prior workflows to those using its agents.

The big picture: The LatAm acquiring market is still dominated by national incumbents, which leaves room for API-first infrastructure plays.

Challengers have emerged to compete for larger merchants and PayFacs, but most still deliver country-by-country builds, unlike Akua's multinational strategy.

"In this market, many processors are incumbents often owned by the three or four biggest banks per country. That makes life hard for independent acquirers," Marín says.

State of play: Akua now offers live connections to Visa and Mastercard in Colombia and Uruguay.

Marín says Akua connected its core acquiring processor to those networks in just eight months.

The company expects to close the year with at least 12 clients signed and in production.

What's next: Akua plans to enable at least two additional jurisdictions — among Argentina, Peru, Mexico and Brazil — by year-end.

It also expects to bring Colombia's Bre-B instant-payments rail online by the end of the year.

Exclusive: Akua raises $8.5M to build LatAm payments infrastructure

Payment facilitators need faster ways to launch across the region.

Illustration of coins arranged in the shape of Latin America.

Akua, which runs acquiring infrastructure across Latin America, raised $8.5 million in seed funding, CEO Carlos Marín tells Axios Pro exclusively.Why it matters: Latin American payment facilitators are seeking faster ways to launch cards and account-to-account payments.

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Exclusive: Akua raises $8.5M to build LatAm payments infrastructure

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