LatAm Payments Company Liquido Raises $27 Million For Launch

Liquido, a payments company for Latin America in the next generation, has come out of secret mode and gone public with $26 million from Index Ventures.

Shanxiang Qi, who used to work for Uber and DiDi, and Mk Li, a former venture capitalist who started his career at Google and then moved to Microsoft Silicon Valley, started Liquido. For the last two years, Liquido, based in California, has been building a payments infrastructure for Latin American businesses, similar to what Stripe did in the US.

Through a closed beta with several top consumer brands, the company has already processed more than $300 million in payments. This was done with a unified and integrated API that allowed merchants to accept and process all forms of payment, including credit and debit cards, bank transfers, digital wallets, and even cash.

Liquido also released Payment Plus Platform (PPP), which works on top of its core payment services and lets clients build stores like Shopify on popular media platforms, starting with a WhatsApp storefront. Customers can use the platform to show off their products, handle payments, and try out new ways to do business. For example, they can hire crowdsourced community sales representatives, run promotional events for groups of loyal customers, and create group buying experiences.

A “Payments Success Booster” on PPP lets you customize fraud flagging and transaction stopping, recover payments made through WhatsApp, switch between payment methods, and use smart routing and retrying to improve conversion rates.

CEO Li says:

“While developing our PPP narratives, invaluable insights and new possibilities have come from our pilot users. For example, an early adopter launched Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns with direct click-through to their branded WhatsApp Liquido Store. Innovative usage like this validates our direction and fuels our determination to provide the solutions our customers and users deserve in this vibrant economy.”