Kushki

Private

LATAM payment infrastructure platform enabling businesses to accept local payment methods across Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Chile through a single unified API.

Bogotá, Colombia | Payment Infrastructure | Est. 2017 | Website

At a Glance

Strength

The single-API-for-LATAM proposition solves a genuinely painful problem — local payment method fragmentation across five countries — that companies like Stripe have historically declined to tackle at the infrastructure level.

Challenge

Multi-country payment infrastructure is genuinely hard to operate — each market has its own regulatory regime, banking relationships, settlement cycles, and failure modes, multiplying operational complexity with each new country.

Opportunity

Embedded finance — offering working capital lending and BNPL installments directly through the payment processing flow — would transform Kushki from a cost center to a revenue center for merchants who already trust its infrastructure.

The LATAM Payments Problem

Latin America has one of the most fragmented payment landscapes in the world. A merchant wanting to accept payments across Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile faces a different set of local methods, banking partners, regulatory requirements, and settlement mechanics in each country. Before companies like Kushki, the only solution was to integrate with a local payments provider in each market — four or five separate integrations, four or five contracts, four or five reconciliation processes. Kushki was founded in 2017 to collapse this complexity into a single API.

The Single API Model

Kushki's core product is a payment processing API that abstracts the complexity of local payment infrastructure behind a unified interface. A merchant integrated with Kushki can accept credit and debit cards, local bank transfers (PSE in Colombia, SPEI in Mexico), cash payments, and digital wallets across all supported markets with the same code, the same dashboard, and the same support relationship. The technical challenge of building this is substantial — it requires deep banking relationships and regulatory licenses in each country — but the product value for merchants is proportionally high.

Funding and Scale

Kushki raised over USD 100 million in a Series B round led by Softbank Latin America Fund, a signal of investor conviction in both the company's execution and the size of the addressable market. The capital has been used to expand country coverage, build redundancy into the infrastructure, and hire the enterprise sales teams required to compete for large-merchant contracts. Processing volume has grown to billions of dollars annually, putting Kushki in the same tier as PayU for coverage, if not yet for scale.

Customer Base

Kushki's customers range from LATAM-native e-commerce companies to global enterprises entering the region for the first time. The latter segment is strategically valuable: a company headquartered in the US or Europe that wants to sell in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru simultaneously has limited alternatives to a provider like Kushki. This global-enterprise segment commands better pricing than domestic SME business and generates the reference cases that accelerate further enterprise adoption.

Competitive Landscape

Kushki's primary regional competitor is PayU, which has operated across LATAM for over two decades and has deeply entrenched merchant relationships. dLocal occupies the same multi-country niche for global enterprises paying out locally. Stripe's expansion into the region is the longer-term threat everyone in the sector watches carefully. Kushki's sustainable advantage lies in the depth of its local payment method coverage and its willingness to build in markets (Ecuador, Peru) that larger players have historically underserved.

Editorial Assessment

The Good, The Bad & Opportunities

The Good

The single-API-for-LATAM proposition solves a genuinely painful problem — local payment method fragmentation across five countries — that companies like Stripe have historically declined to tackle at the infrastructure level.
A Series B of over USD 100 million validated the market thesis and gave Kushki the runway to build redundant infrastructure, expand country coverage, and invest in enterprise sales — all capital-intensive but strategically necessary.
Deep local payment method coverage (PSE in Colombia, PagoEfectivo in Peru, SPEI in Mexico, etc.) creates real switching costs for merchants who have integrated and tested payment flows across markets.

The Challenge

Multi-country payment infrastructure is genuinely hard to operate — each market has its own regulatory regime, banking relationships, settlement cycles, and failure modes, multiplying operational complexity with each new country.
Stripe's eventual serious entry into LATAM markets remains the sector's most-discussed threat; its developer brand, global card network relationships, and capital base would be formidable if fully deployed.
Enterprise payment infrastructure is a low-margin, high-volume business — sustaining the investment levels required to maintain infrastructure quality while achieving profitability requires either very large scale or premium pricing power.
Kushki's founding in Ecuador and primary identity as a LATAM-wide player means it lacks a single dominant home market — a structural challenge in a region where local relationships and regulatory trust are built country by country.
Payment infrastructure clients are sticky but demanding: a single outage or settlement delay can trigger rapid escalation to executive level, and the operational burden of SLA management across five regulatory environments is significant.

Opportunities

Embedded finance — offering working capital lending and BNPL installments directly through the payment processing flow — would transform Kushki from a cost center to a revenue center for merchants who already trust its infrastructure.
Brazil, the largest LATAM market, remains absent from Kushki's country coverage; a successful entry with local payment method depth comparable to competitors would significantly expand the addressable market.
Transaction data from processing billions in annual payment volume is a genuinely valuable intelligence asset — merchant analytics, consumer spend pattern reports, and fraud-as-a-service products are all monetizable without acquiring new customers.
Open banking regulation across LATAM markets is creating demand for account-to-account payment infrastructure that complements card processing; Kushki's multi-country banking relationships position it to build this layer before pure-play open banking entrants gain traction.

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