Akua

Akua is a Colombian payments company that provides cloud-based payment infrastructure for banks, fintechs, acquirers, processors and aggregators in Latin America. Its platform is organized as six integrated modules exposed through a single API: payments processing (checkout, split payments, embeddable elements, subscriptions, smart POS, alternative payment methods, terminals and mobility), risk and fraud (fraud engine, rules engine, 3DS, KYC/AML, network tokenization), financial operations (settlement, reconciliation, payouts, cashouts, billing, tax management), data and reporting (data lake, dashboards, reports, analytics, data sync), merchant services (merchant hub, terminal management, promotions, customer intelligence, advance pay) and core services (white label, organizations, users, webhooks, feature flags).

The company markets two commercial models. "Acquiring as a Service" targets fintechs, cooperatives, neobanks and retailers that want to become acquirers, and bundles an acquiring license, direct Visa and Mastercard connections, automated settlement and clearing, a white-label merchant dashboard and multi-country regulatory compliance, with a stated time to market of under 90 days. The "Processing Solution" is a cloud-native processing core aimed at tier 1 banks, acquirers, processors and PSPs, offered on a single-tenant basis with native ISO 8583 support alongside REST APIs. Akua states certifications including PCI DSS 4.0, PCI PIN, SOC 2 and ISO 27001, and support for card rails, local payment methods and stablecoins.

Akua positions artificial intelligence as a native layer rather than an add-on, describing more than 20 proprietary agents (30+ in one description) that handle fraud prevention, routing, chargebacks, merchant support, AML/KYC, due diligence, financial operations, insights, merchant onboarding, settlement, billing, risk scoring, tokenization, reconciliation, tax, compliance, promotions and data synchronization. Agents are built on the Model Context Protocol, allowing an LLM such as Claude, GPT or Gemini to interpret intent, map it to permissioned tools via Akua's MCP layer, and execute operations through the Akua API with auditing and traceability. The company also publishes an MCP server (npx akua-mcp) compatible with Claude, Cursor and Windsurf, and describes agentic payments features including conversational onboarding and contextual payment link generation.

Founding story

Akua was founded in 2024 by former employees of payment companies: Carlos Marín (previously Mastercard, Pomelo and PayU), José Behrend (dLocal and Pomelo) and Rodrigo Rodrigues (Mastercard and Movii) [3].

Business model

Akua sells payments infrastructure to financial institutions and payment companies rather than to end consumers, under two models: acquiring-as-a-service, in which the acquiring license and compliance are included for firms that want to become acquirers, and a technology-only processing solution for institutions that already hold an acquiring license. Its platform is white-label, so customers operate merchant-facing portals under their own brand [0][1].

Traction

Akua reported raising $13M in its first year of operations as of October 2025. Its AI platform page lists multiple agents as "in production," including agentic payments checkout, merchant support, analytics, legal, KYC/KYB, financial, reconciliation, fraud operations, chargebacks, merchant onboarding and compliance agents [2][4].

Latest developments

In October 2025 Akua announced an $8.5M seed extension round led by Flourish Ventures and Cathay Latam, with participation from Atlantico, Honey Island, 4UM Investimentos, Krealo and Simma Capital, earmarked for expansion into Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru and Central America. Its current positioning emphasizes AI-native infrastructure with 20+ specialized agents, MCP-based agent operability and support for card rails, local payments, stablecoins and agentic payments [1][2][4].