Colombia-based fintech Akua has successfully closed an $8.5 million seed round, bringing its total funding to $13 million in less than a year. With this new capital injection, the company plans to expand its operations to Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and Central America.
The round was co-led by Flourish Ventures and Cathay Latam, two global funds with extensive experience in the fintech ecosystem. It also included participation from Atlântico, Honey Island 4UM (Brazil), Krealo —the corporate venture arm of Credicorp (Peru)— and Simma Capital (Colombia). Additional investors included Propel Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley-based fund that led Akua’s pre-seed round together with H2O Capital Innovation, as well as Rally Cap VC, Plug and Play Tech Center, IC Ventures, and a group of experienced fintech angel investors.
“Akua is proving that the next generation of acquiring can be built at the speed of a startup. In just a few months, they launched a cloud-native, AI-powered platform that delivers the speed, flexibility, and reliability this market has been waiting for,” said Federico Gómez Romero, Head of Cathay Latam.
Founded by Carlos Marín (Colombia), Juan José Behrend (Uruguay), and Rodrigo Rodrigues (Brazil) —three executives with over 45 years of combined experience in the payments industry— Akua was created with the mission to democratize and streamline the acquiring business, traditionally dominated by a few major players in markets such as Colombia.
In just 12 months, Akua has built a certified acquiring processor, gone live with Mastercard and Visa in Colombia and Uruguay, and achieved an integrated capacity to process more than 50 million transactions per day. Among its main achievements, the company highlights:
“Our goal is to enable any company that wants to become an acquirer to deploy a complete, end-to-end acquiring solution in less than six hours — ready to onboard merchants, process payments, and operate with everything that entails. We position ourselves as the new payments highway in Latin America,” said Juan José Behrend, CTO and co-founder of Akua.
The paytech already operates in Colombia and Uruguay and will use the new funding to accelerate its regional expansion. The company offers transaction processing, pay-by-link, tokenization, Tap to Phone, certified banking security, and a real-time Payments Hub, helping reduce operating costs for aggregators, acquirers, and financial institutions while enhancing the end-customer experience.
“This achievement is 100% the result of the talent and passion that drive Akua every day,” the founding team stated, emphasizing that this round “validates our vision and, above all, the commitment and energy of this incredible team.”
With this milestone, Akua strengthens its position as Latin America’s AI-native payments infrastructure leader, ready to transform the acquiring industry across the region
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