The big goal for the 39-year-old Silva, who was born in a small town in Sao Paulo state and taught himself programming, is for his company to become an ‘interplanetary payments solution’. — Photo by David Dvořáček on Unsplash
Luis Silva, the chief executive officer and founder of Brazilian payments startup CloudWalk, has lofty ambitions.
After launching the firm a decade ago, he’s now taking tap-to-pay and other technologies to merchants in the US with plans to expand globally – and then into outer space – in an unusual type of long-term planning.
The Sao Paulo-based firm broke even last year, with 1.1 million clients bringing in about US$400mil (RM1.88bil) of yearly revenue, Silva said in an interview. It’s raised a total of US$360mil (RM1.69bil) in venture capital financing with the last round in 2021 valuing it at US$2.15bil (RM10.13bil), counting Coatue, DST Global and Valor Capital among financial backers.
The US, which lags Brazil in many aspects around digital and instant payments but has a transaction volume 10 times larger than the South American country, will provide scale, Silva said. Further down the line, CloudWalk will look at other markets like Asia and the Middle East, he added.
“We know that tap-to-pay and instant payments can really help American merchants, especially right now that the US is facing high inflation,” Silva said. “What we’ve learned in Brazil is every time you help the customer improve their cash flow they sell more and grow faster.”
The company will target New York City, San Francisco and Austin first with the app called Jim.com which will offer merchants payments solutions to help grow their businesses and receive money instantly from sales.
The biggest challenge to expansion is an educational one, Silva said, as many Americans still pay some of their bills using paper cheques sent through the mail, for example.
In Brazil, the central bank launched its rate-free instant transfer system known as Pix in 2020, which has already surpassed credit and debit cards as the preferred method of payment, recording more than 66 billion transactions in three years. The US Federal Reserve recently followed in Brazil’s footsteps with the start of its FedNow payment service.
CloudWalk has about 500 employees and uses artificial intelligence heavily to automate some activities including customer service and compliance. The firm would need about 1,100 employees to do the work its current 10 AI “agents” perform, according to Silva.
“We’re definitely using AI for real. It’s not just a buzzword,” he said. “We’re really improving our efficiency and reducing the cost of our operation.”
Employees are spread out across 15 countries, with the chief financial officer based in New York.
In Brazil, CloudWalk is known for its product InfinitePay which removes the need to use a card machine by converting any smartphone into a card reader to accept payments. They also offer ecommerce solutions and have lent “hundreds of millions” of reais as part of the credit arm, Silva said.
As the firm is currently profitable, it has no new funding needs but could consider an additional capital raise ahead of a potential initial public offering. An IPO could happen as soon as late 2025 when the market is expected to improve and would almost certainly be in the US, he said.
The big goal for the 39-year-old Silva, who was born in a small town in Sao Paulo state and taught himself programming, is for his company to become an “interplanetary payments solution”.
Aware of the giggles that sort of mantra may produce, he counters that within 40 years, humans might need to pay for things in other planets, citing plans by billionaires including Elon Musk to colonise Mars.
In 2014, Silva was selected to live and study at NASA Ames Research Park in Silicon Valley and he attended Singularity University there, delving into topics about the future and disruptive technologies. He also draws inspiration from the Long Now Foundation, which encourages planning for the next 10,000 years.
“We want to be a US$1 trillion (RM4.71 trillion) market cap company that is the global payment network. And after that we want to expand our technology to other planets,” Silva said. “That’s the big dream.” – Bloomberg
