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 a 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 that lets a small merchant take card payments, open a free digital account, and borrow money, all from a phone.

JIM is the company AI brain, used for fraud detection, credit decisions, and customer support. CloudWalk has also experimented with a stablecoin and blockchain rails to move money more cheaply.

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 technology to keep costs down, including an AI system it built called JIM to handle fraud and support. By 2023 InfinitePay had passed a million customers and the company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Then it kept going and started planning a move into the United States.

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.

CloudWalk has raised $365 million. The headline round came in November 2021, when Coatue led a $150 million investment that valued the company at $2.15 billion and turned it into a Brazilian unicorn.

That followed a $190 million round earlier the same year, at the time the biggest Series B ever raised by a Brazilian startup. What makes CloudWalk unusual is that it barely needs outside cash anymore.

It funds its own growth straight from profit.