Visa Completes Landmark $1 Billion Acquisition of Brazilian Fintech Startup Pismo
Credit card giant Visa has made a significant acquisition, purchasing Brazilian financial startup Pismo for $1 billion in a historic deal. This transaction ranks among the largest fintech mergers and acquisitions of the year.
Visa's acquisition of Pismo aligns with its strategy to provide cloud-native APIs for core banking and issuer processing capabilities to its clients. The move will support emerging payment systems like Pix for Visa's financial institution customers, enabling the company to deliver differentiated issuer solutions. The deal is subject to regulatory approvals and closing conditions.
During Pismo's Series B funding round, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel, e-commerce giant Amazon, and SoftBank jointly led the financing. With this round, Pismo's total funds raised reached $118 million, including contributions from Falabella Ventures, PruVen, and existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Headline. Although the company did not disclose its valuation, Accel partner Ethan Choi stated that the sales price reflected a "very strategic multiple."
Pismo, a payments infrastructure firm based in São Paulo, was established in 2016 by Juliana Motta (CPO), Ricardo Josua (CEO), Daniela Binatti, and Marcelo Parise (VP of Engineering). Through its impressive growth, Pismo has garnered an impressive client base including renowned organizations such as Citi, Ita (a leading Brazilian bank), Revolut, N26, Nubank, and Cora. The startup currently manages over 40 million issued cards and nearly 80 million accounts, processes more than 50 billion API calls and facilitating $40 billion in annual transaction volumes.
Pismo also aims to empower clients to launch advanced payment and banking products on a single cloud-native platform. Visa was among several companies vying for the startup, which was not actively seeking acquisition or fundraising. This transaction represents one of the largest cross-border fintech deals in Latin America and showcases a global card network providing core banking and card issuing services to banks and financial institutions.
Since its launch in Brazil in 2021, Pismo, a cloud-native issuer processing and core banking platform, has expanded tremendously. Pismo today operates in Latin American nations, the US, Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, and India with less than 10 million accounts. The business, which provides solutions for marketplaces, digital banking, digital wallets, cards, and payments, obtained $108 million in Series B funding in October 2021. The $2.15 billion acquisition of Visa by the area of Latin America represents a crucial turning point after a cash crunch in 2019.
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