CLOUDWALK

Luis Silva started CloudWalk in 2013 with a simple frustration. Card payments in Brazil were expensive and slow.

A handful of banks controlled the whole system and treated small merchants like an afterthought. Silva wanted to fix the plumbing.

In 2019 the company launched InfinitePay, a payments platform aimed squarely at the small businesses everyone else ignored. The pitch was blunt.

Lower fees, faster money, no bank branch required. It caught on fast.

CloudWalk makes money the way most payment companies do. It takes a small cut every time a merchant swipes a card through InfinitePay.

Multiply a tiny fee by more than 6 million small businesses and it adds up fast. The company also lends to those same merchants and gives them a digital account.

The real trick is keeping its own costs low enough that those thin fees still leave a profit. Most rivals never crack that math.

CloudWalk did.

InfinitePay is the main event. It is a payments app and card reader, and it also lets a phone take tap-to-pay, so a small merchant can take card payments, open a free digital account, and borrow money from one app.

In 2023 CloudWalk was Apple's first Tap to Pay partner in Brazil. JIM is the brand it uses outside Brazil, launched in the United States as JIM.com.

Behind both sit AI agents that CloudWalk says do the work themselves, from fraud checks to credit to support. The plan is to own the entire money stack for small businesses.

The growth hack was pricing plus focus. CloudWalk went after the small merchants that big banks could not be bothered to serve, then undercut everyone on fees.

It leaned hard on its own AI to keep costs down, and by 2025 it was doing about $1.8 million of revenue per employee with just 720 people. InfinitePay went from 3 million to more than 6.3 million active sellers during 2025 and became the most downloaded finance app in Brazil's App Store that December.

The US push, JIM.com, launched in early 2025 and CloudWalk says it reached tens of thousands of merchants in all 50 states within months.

Payments is a brutal, low-margin business. Brazil is one of the most competitive fintech markets on earth.

CloudWalk fights giants like Nubank, Stone, and PagBank, plus the very banks it was built to disrupt. Staying profitable means squeezing costs forever while defending its fees.

Expanding to the US means starting that fight all over again on someone else territory, against Square and Stripe. Winning at home was hard.

Winning abroad is harder.

Coatue is the big backer. It led a $190 million Series B in May 2021, at the time the biggest Series B ever raised by a Brazilian startup, and then led the $150 million Series C that November at a $2.15 billion valuation.

DST Global, FIS, Valor Capital Group, A-Star, Plug and Play and angel Gokul Rajaram also came in across those rounds. What makes CloudWalk unusual is that it has not needed a new equity round since.

It funds its growth from profit, plus credit funds it raises to lend to merchants.