São Paulo — Pismo, a Brazilian cloud financial services platform, announced today that it raised $108 million to drive its global expansion and accelerate the development of technologies for banking, payments, and financial market infrastructure.
The Series B investment round was led by SoftBank Latin America Fund, Amazon, and Accel, but also featured stakes from B3, Falabella Ventures and PruVen, in addition to previous investors Headline and Redpoint ventures.
Unlike most fintechs, Pismo prefers to be identified as a “techfin” as it is a pure technology company that provides services – platform as a service (PaaS) – for the financial sector. Pismo has as clients some of the largest banks, fintechs and retail chains in Latin America, including Banco Itaú, BTG, Cora, N26 and Falabella.
The service verticals, all native to the cloud, are banking, payments, financial market infrastructure, and marketplaces.
Founded in 2016 by four entrepreneurs in the technology area, Pismo is a reference in the segment for helping banks and financial companies to migrate the so-called technological “legacy” to the cloud – a tangle of systems that, in the Brazilian case, goes back to successive mergers and acquisitions and devices to meet regulatory requirements.
With the migration to the cloud, customers solve several gaps resulting from the obsolescence of such legacy systems, being able to launch new products and services quickly, including connecting with third parties, in addition to scaling systems according to expansion needs, without giving up security and of availability. It is a unique system to deal with open banking, instant payments, and general information sharing that only reaches Brazil and other countries.
Due to the success in updating the legacies, Pismo was led to do the same type of service with international clients, and today it also operates in Europe, North America, and Asia.
”The technology players and talents are all global, hence the need to expand internationally,” said Ricardo Joshua, company CEO. “We enabled our clients to create some of the most innovative products in the financial market. We are hiring more than 200 engineers and product management, sales and corporate management professionals to lead the transformation in payments and banking services around the world,” he said.
According to Joshua, the platform processes more than 4 billion API calls per month, making it one of the largest cloud-based in the world. Pismo hosts more than 25 million accounts that move together with $3 billion a month in transactions.
