Why We Invested in Akua

The Akua team met a moment: Colombia’s central bank opened up the merchant acquiring market to fintechs in 2022 as part of an initiative to modernize the nation’s financial system, and Akua would be the AI-native platform for companies that wanted to offer or optimize payment acceptance but were constrained by legacy infrastructure dominated by a duopoly.

They also knew from their extensive regional experience that this combination of regulatory tailwinds, market structure, and technology needs were not unique to Colombia, but were present in some form in every Spanish-speaking country in Latin America.

“Payments infrastructure was slow, rigid, and built on legacy systems that couldn’t keep up with the innovation of fintechs, banks, and merchants,” co-founder and CEO Carlos Marín told us. “The ‘aha’ moment came when we realized that, instead of waiting for incumbents to modernize, we could build a cloud-native, AI-powered acquiring processor ourselves.”

We found the proposal compelling, built upon a cloud-based acquiring-as-a-service model, and in the almost one year since we first invested in Akua’s $4.3 million pre-seed, the team has built a fully certified, production-ready acquiring platform from the ground up. 

It has also expanded into Uruguay, with two more LatAm markets in the near future and more in the works. We believe that the Akua team has the clarity, agility, and discipline required to rewire payments infrastructure across Latin America and beyond, and that’s why we are proud to co-lead its $8.5 million seed round alongside Cathay Latam, with participation from Atlantico, Honey Island, Krealo, Simma Capital, Propel Venture Partners, HTwenty, and angel investors.

Deep regional expertise 

In addition to Carlos, the Akua founding team is composed of CTO Juan José Behrend and COO Rodrigo Rodrigues. They would found their company in Bogotá, in Carlos’ home country of Colombia, but Juanjo’s roots in Uruguay and Rodrigo’s in Brazil bring valuable context that was from the earliest days based on the region rather than just one country.

Carlos and Rodrigo met at Mastercard, where they closed high-profile neobank deals in the Andean market (Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and Bolivia). A couple years later, Carlos was LatAm Head of Acquiring and Colombia Country Manager at PayU and signed Movii as acquirer, where Rodrigo happened to be building its acquiring business from scratch.

Carlos’ next role brought him to the infra fintech Pomelo, where he met Juanjo, who was Director of Infrastructure and Technology. Together, they closed deals with some of the region’s largest banks, aligning product and commercial strategy. They were inspired by Colombia’s new pro-innovation regulation in 2022, and saw a future where the country could follow Brazil’s lead in payments, which could then spread to other LatAm countries. The two began discussing what would become Akua, and called on Rodrigo to join them.

The name, pronounced “acqua,” comes from the indigenous Colombian Wayuu people, and is translated as “speed” — the guiding force behind the company’s comprehensive payment hub. They launched in 2024.

“We knew we had something real when early customers integrated in a matter of weeks — even minutes in one live case — something unheard of in payments,” Carlos said. “The feedback was clear: Akua eliminated friction, reduced costs, and gave them a competitive edge. Securing our first Tier 1 clients and closing contracts across multiple countries validated that this wasn’t just a ‘nice to have,’ but a mission-critical layer of infrastructure.”  

Launching full-scale operations with unmatched speed

Akua’s platform is for acquiring banks and fintechs, payment gateways, and payment aggregators, and connects directly to Visa, Mastercard, real-time payments (RTP), alternative payment methods, and crypto rails. The hub allows customers to centralize operations, automate workflows, and scale digital payments across Latin America. 

It utilizes more than 20 active AI agents, reducing operating costs by up to 60%. AI is embedded throughout, used for fraud detection and prevention, chargeback automation, customer service, reconciliations, onboarding, and real-time analytics. 

The platform unifies multiple features — transaction processing, pay-by-link, tokenization, tap-to-phone, certified banking-grade security, and a real-time payments hub — into a single system.

As an example of it in action, take Colombian payment gateway company OnePay. It provides businesses with a unified platform to automate collections and payouts, helping them move money instantly through banks, wallets, and other payment channels. But to actually authorize and settle those transactions across card networks, OnePay needs a licensed, compliant processor underneath.

The actual work that requires is what attracted the team to Akua. As a cloud-based acquiring-as-a-service company, Akua provides the certified rails that enables OnePay to accept and settle card payments quickly and securely. Its infrastructure replaces the slow, closed systems long dominated by Colombia’s legacy processors, offering modern APIs, real-time visibility, and regional interoperability.

The following video, a OnePay case study, is in Spanish. Enable closed captions for an English option if English is your account’s default.

By plugging into Akua’s platform, OnePay can launch and scale card acceptance without building deep integrations with legacy acquirers or pursuing its own payment and card data certifications. Akua handles the regulatory and technical complexity — like network connectivity, compliance, fraud monitoring, and settlement — allowing OnePay to focus on automating financial operations for businesses.

OnePay CEO Camilio Fonseca noted that the entire implementation of Akua took under 10 hours, an amount less than the work put into some project mockups. The result was a transformation into being a “technology-led company” with countless hours of operational labor saved. 

As Carlos put it, “We are redefining acquiring infrastructure in emerging markets — moving from legacy, manual, closed systems to open, cloud-native, AI-driven rails. By doing this, we lower barriers for PSPs [payment service providers], banks, fintechs, and retailers to enter and scale, making payments simpler, faster, and more affordable for millions of businesses and consumers.

Proven in Colombia, but built to scale

Akua wasted no time in acquiring the certifications needed to expand globally, and will use this round of funding to accelerate its plan to expand into its next target markets: Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Central America.

It will also continue to invest in its agentic AI modules in fraud, know-your-customer/business (KYC/KYB), and expanding the team.

We are confident that in the same way it proved its business model in Colombia before expanding to Uruguay, it will be able to fulfill the next phase of its vision , becoming “the operating system for acquiring” across Latin America.