Credit Card Giant, Visa, Acquires Brazilian Payments Startup, Pismo, for $1 billion

Brazilian company Pismo’s payments infrastructure will be acquired by credit card giant Visa for $1 billion in cash.

Visa disclosed the acquisition plan in a written statement on Thursday. 

The transaction is most likely one of the biggest fintech M&A transactions occurring so far this year.

Juliana Motta (CPO), Ricardo Josua (CEO), Daniela Binatti (CTO), and Marcelo Parise (VP of engineering) founded the company in 2016.

Aiming to provide banks, fintechs, and other financial institutions with “flexibility and agility,” Pismo’s cloud-native issuer processing and core banking platform.

Pismo, situated in So Paulo, has steadily amassed a long number of illustrious clients, including Citi, Ita (one of Brazil’s top banks), Revolut, N26, Nubank, and Cora.

Visa said that by acquiring Pismo, it “will be positioned to provide core banking and issuer processing capabilities across debit, prepaid, credit and commercial cards for clients via cloud native APIs.”

“Through the acquisition of Pismo, Visa can better serve our financial institution and fintech clients with more differentiated issuer solutions they can offer their customers,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer,

The startup’s Series B financing was co-led by Silicon Valley venture capital company Accel, e-commerce behemoth Amazon, and SoftBank. 

The round, which increased Pismo’s total cash raised to $118 million, included participation from Falabella Ventures, PruVen, as well as current backers Redpoint Ventures and Headline.