Akua's $13M bet: AI-native acquiring rails to break LatAm's processor duopoly

Acquiring-as-a-service: a certified cloud processor that lets banks, gateways, and aggregators accept cards and real-time payments.

That banks and fintechs will rent certified, AI-powered acquiring rails instead of building or tolerating legacy processors, market by market across LatAm.

$13M total: $4.3M pre-seed (Oct 2024) and $8.5M seed (Oct 2025)

After Colombia's central bank opened merchant acquiring to fintechs in 2022, Carlos Marín (ex-PayU LatAm head of acquiring), Juan José Behrend (ex-dLocal and Pomelo) and Rodrigo Rodrigues (ex-Mastercard) founded Akua in Bogotá in August 2024, deliberately starting in a smaller market to prove the thesis before scaling.

Akua raised a $4.3M pre-seed in October 2024 and built a fully certified production acquiring platform. It expanded to Uruguay, then closed an $8.5M seed in October 2025 co-led by Flourish Ventures and Cathay Latam, with Atlantico, Honey Island, Krealo, Simma Capital, Propel Venture Partners, and HTwenty participating — bringing total funding to $13M within a year of operations. The platform runs more than 20 AI agents across fraud, chargebacks, onboarding, and reconciliation, cutting operating costs by up to 60%.

Live in Colombia and Uruguay with about 40 employees across Bogotá, Montevideo, and São Paulo; next markets Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, and Central America.

Colombia's central bank opened merchant acquiring to fintechs in 2022, but legacy processors still dominated — creating a window for cloud-native rails.

The team knew the pain from inside: Marín led acquiring at PayU, Behrend built infrastructure at dLocal and Pomelo, Rodrigues spent eight years at Mastercard.

Certification, compliance, and fraud moats make acquiring-as-a-service a repeatable playbook for every Spanish-speaking market.

When a regulator liberalizes infrastructure, sell the rails to everyone entering it: Akua turned Colombia's 2022 acquiring reform into a regional platform business.

As of October 2025, Akua operates in Colombia and Uruguay with offices in Bogotá, Montevideo, and São Paulo and about 40 employees. It plans to use the $13M to expand into Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, and Central America, and to deepen its agentic AI modules in fraud and KYC/KYB. The company had not disclosed revenue.