Ideas can pop up where you least expect them. This happened with Geopagos, a payment acceptance infrastructure startup born in Buenos Aires and now with a regional presence. It all began in 2012, on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, when Julian Lisenberg, one of the four founders (currently the company’s CRO), entered an Apple Store and discovered that he could pay with his card by swiping it through an iPhone.
Fascinated by this experience, when he returned, he got together with three friends to tell them about his idea. A year later—along with Sebastián Núñez Castro (CEO), Raúl Oyarzun (CTO), and Fernando Tauscher (General Counsel)—the project was already underway.
Until this year, the company had been growing by pure bootstrapping. But in 2022, they went a step further and closed a US$35 million round led by Riverwood Capital and with the participation of Endeavor Catalyst.
Julian Lisenberg answered Contxto’s questionnaire.
What problem does your startup solve?
We are the payment acceptance infrastructure with a complete omnichannel value proposition in Latin America. Our purpose is to empower digital payments to transform the buying and selling experience of millions of people. We are the technology partner (technology enabler) for companies or institutions that want to launch and grow their payment acceptance business in an unmatched time to market through connections and integrations. Together with our more than 30 customers in 15 countries in LatAm, we develop digital payment solutions that enable the financial inclusion of thousands of businesses, SMEs, independent professionals, and entrepreneurs.
How are you different from others who have tried this idea before?
The digital payment solutions we develop are white label [clients put their brand on the product they develop] and customizable, can be end-to-end or modular, and integrate all payment acceptance methods in one place, both the present and online world, as well as payment processing (front and back office) offering our clients an omnichannel value proposition, innovative and unique in the region. We have more than nine years of experience, extensive regional knowledge, and connections and integrations with processors, clearing houses, wallets, and correspondents for telephony or payment services in 15 countries in LatAm that allow us to guarantee our clients to go to other markets in a faster time-to-market.
How do you generate revenue?
Today, we are B2B2C, and we charge our customers through a SaaS model based on usage. We license our solution to customers in exchange for a monthly recurring fee that is defined based on the number of merchants and the number of transactions using the platform each month. We also offer custom software development services and a full suite of hardware options to complement our end-to-end solution.
What achievement of your company are you most proud of?
We are very proud of the path we have built up to this point as a team, which today reaches 350 employees. In these nine years, we have opened different markets in the region, such as Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, and we are currently entering Brazil. 2022 was a very important year as we received a US$35 million capital round led by Riverwood Capital, a global investor in high-growth technology companies, with the participation of Endeavor Catalyst. The round represents the company’s first institutional financing and will facilitate the acceleration of our expansion plan in Latin America while increasing investments in our technology infrastructure.
What is the next step for the company?
We will continue our regional expansion process as we understand that there is a huge opportunity and growth potential in the payment acceptance sector in Latin America. In particular, we will drive our recent entry into the Brazilian market, focusing on tap-to-phone, a technology that turns the Android smartphone into a contactless payment terminal. And to continue scaling the business, during 2023, we will also be adding equipment and expanding and strengthening our product offering for e-commerce.
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