Visa has agreed to acquire Brazilian fintech company Pismo, known for its cloud-based payment and banking platforms. The acquisition price amounts to USD 1 billion.

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in São Paulo, Pismo has quietly built an impressive clientele that includes renowned names such as Citi, Itaú (one of Brazil's largest banks), Revolut, N26, Nubank and Cora. The fintech startup has gained considerable popularity, processing nearly $40 billion in transactions annually and handling nearly 50 billion API calls. With its robust infrastructure, Pismo has served more than 80 million accounts and issued more than 40 million cards. Pismo has expanded into several Latin American countries, including Mexico and Chile. It also operates in the United States and Europe. In addition, the startup boasts a growing customer base in India, Southeast Asia and Australia. In 2021, Pismo successfully raised $108 million in a Series B funding round from investors such as SoftBank Group, Amazon, and Accel.

The acquisition of Pismo enables Visa to expand its global offering to include banking processing and card issuing services, including debit, prepaid, credit and commercial cards, for its customers around the world via cloud-based APIs. The robust infrastructure provided by Pismo will also make it easier for Visa customers to seamlessly connect to emerging payment schemes such as Brazil's PIX. The acquisition of Pismo comes roughly 15 months after Visa completed a deal to acquire Swedish open banking platform Tink for $2.15 billion.

According to Crunchbase, the acquisition of Pismo is part of a broader M&A trend in fintech and payments, with nearly 150 such deals since the start of the calendar year, despite the current challenging funding environment. According to Crunchbase, the acquisition ranks as the sixth largest acquisition of the year. It closely follows T-Mobile's acquisition of Mint Mobile, which ranked fifth with a sale price of $1.35 billion.