Palla

Palla, legally Palla Financial Inc., is a cross-border payments company that enables instant peer-to-peer money transfers from the United States to other countries. Its stated focus is remittance-style transfers, where senders in the US initiate a payment from their phone and recipients abroad receive funds in seconds, including directly to a debit card. The company positions this against a traditional remittance process it describes as slow, time-consuming and largely cash-based.

The product is delivered to institutions rather than only to end consumers. Palla offers a suite of APIs, embeddable pre-built payment components (payment links, transfer connections, transfer profiles, an FX calculator, transaction history and receipts) and fully white-labeled applications that partners can launch under their own brand. Palla handles FX, payment-rail optimization, KYC, compliance screening and partner banking on behalf of its partners. Its public API documentation references a v3 stable API with idempotency, webhooks and HMAC signing.

The company was founded in 2020 and took part in Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch. Its site states it is live in the US–Ecuador corridor and shows illustrative flows for US-to-Mexico and US-to-Colombia transfers. As of the company's 2025 materials, Palla reported more than 50 live corridors, a median transfer time under 10 seconds, and more than 2.5 million enrolled users, with a footnote stating that 90% of transfers complete within 120 seconds.

Founding story

Palla was founded in 2020. Its founders include Enrique Perezalonso, who serves as CEO and has an MBA from MIT Sloan and prior experience at McKinsey & Co. and in traditional financial institutions and fintechs across Mexico, England and the US; Andrew Mason, co-founder and Chief Product Officer, previously CPO of Lana, a US neobank co-created by BCG, and earlier a product leader at BCG and at Intel Capital-backed FlashGrade; and Gregory Piccolo, co-founder and CTO.

Business model

Palla sells cross-border payment infrastructure to banks, fintechs, marketplaces and enterprises, which embed Palla's P2P payment flows into their own applications either through APIs and pre-built components or via fully white-labeled apps. Palla operates the underlying FX, rail routing, compliance and partner-banking layer.

Consumer-facing transfer flows shown on the company's site display a per-transfer fee (illustrated at $2.99) plus an applied exchange rate; the site also refers to corridor-level economics discussed with prospective partners.

Traction

As of its 2025 site, Palla reported over 50 live corridors, more than 2.5 million enrolled users, a median transfer time under 10 seconds and 99.999% platform uptime in 2025. At its May 2025 Series A it reported over 30 partnerships with financial institutions and distribution networks reaching a potential user base of more than 150 million people. A published partner case study cites $100m+ in international deposits, 10 weeks from kickoff to launch, an 8-second median transfer time and 250,000+ enrolled users. Team size was listed at 22.

Latest developments

In May 2025 Palla closed a $14.5m Series A led by Revolution Ventures, with Revolution managing partner David Golden and Heidi Miller, former president of JPMorgan International, joining the board. The company said it would use the capital to add payment corridors, launch new money-movement features, broaden its product offering and scale operations, with additional integrations planned before year-end.