CloudWalk at $1.3B/year growing 131% YoY
Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: São Paulo-based CloudWalk built a vertically integrated payments and credit platform serving 6M+ Brazilian merchants with ~500 employees—roughly 4x the revenue-per-employee of traditional acquirers. CloudWalk hit $1.3B in annualized revenue in 2025, up 131% YoY from $562M in 2024. For more, check out our full report and dataset on CloudWalk.
Key points via Sacra AI:
- Until 2010, the duopoly of Cielo & Rede (93% of all card volume) ruled Brazil's merchant acquiring market, charging high take rates and settling merchants in 28-30 days, before regulators broke their brand exclusivity with Visa & Mastercard respectively and triggered the "guerra das maquininhas," (POS war) where insurgents like StoneCo (NASDAQ: STNE, 13% market share) and PagSeguro (NYSE: PAGS, 13% market share) brought card acceptance to millions of previously unbanked small merchants through cheap hardware & lower fees. Cielo (now ~30% market share, $164B volume in 2025) & Rede (~26% market share) fought back against the wave of payments startups by cutting their fees on merchants and phasing out hardware terminal rental fees, eroding their own margins to protect market share—but merchants still struggled with cash flow, regularly waiting 30+ days for card proceeds and paying high rates to advance receivables.
- Founded in 2013, CloudWalk spent its first six years building cloud-native software and payment processing for the fintechs and ISOs fighting Brazil’s POS wars before going direct-to-merchant with InfinitePay in 2019, launching a low-cost card terminal & merchant account for Brazil’s ~10 million hairdressers, street vendors, delivery drivers & other micro-entrepreneurs earning $500-$1,000/month, paying 5% fees on card transactions and waiting 30+ days for settlement. Launching with transaction fees roughly half of incumbents' with next-day settlement, InfinitePay helped CloudWalk grow from ~$2M in annualized revenue at its 2019 launch to ~$189M by 2021 and ~$390M by 2023, scaling from 70,000 merchants to 6M+ while expanding into digital accounts, payment links, and AI-underwritten working capital loans financed through over $1.3B in FIDC debt issuance.
- Serving 6M+ merchants with ~500 employees, roughly 4x the revenue-per-employee of traditional acquirers like Cielo, Sacra estimates CloudWalk hit $1.3B in gross annualized revenue in 2025, up 131% YoY from $562M in 2024, with cards still as the biggest revenue driver (~50% of revenue) & $128M in annualized net profit. Compare to Brazilian merchant acquirers StoneCo at $2.6B in 2025 revenue valued at $3.6B for a 1.4x multiple & PagSeguro at $3.7B in 2025 revenue valued at $2.7B for a 0.7x multiple, American fintech & Square parent Block at $24.2B in 2025 revenue valued at $35.8B for a 1.5x multiple, and LatAm digital banks Nubank (NU) at $16.3B in 2025 revenue valued at $67B for a 4.1x multiple & Mexican B2B neobank Kapital at $548M in annualized 2025 revenue up 198% YoY, valued at $1.3B for a 2.4x multiple.
- Rather than fight potentially disruptive technologies in stablecoins and Pix, Brazil's instant payment rail that reached 47% of non-cash payment volume in 2024 at merchant costs of 0.22% vs. 2.34% for credit cards, CloudWalk has absorbed them into the platform with the launch of its own stablecoin in the Brazilian Digital Real (6-second settlement), free unlimited Pix, & the launch of Pix Credit in 2024 to build on CloudWalk’s core value proposition of extremely fast settlement & lower merchant fees even at a much lower rate of its own monetization, betting that winning market share with merchant experience, pushing forward digital payments and building value-added services will expand per-merchant revenue as credit, lending and software are layered on top. India's UPI now processes 83% of India's retail digital payment volume, yet credit card transactions doubled from 209 to 447 crore between 2019 and 2024 while debit cards fell from 495 to 174 crore, and RBI subsequently expanded UPI to support credit lines on the same rail, showing that cheap instant rails commoditize debit while credit gets rebuilt on top of them.
- Now expanding into the US, CloudWalk launched JIM.com in early 2025 as a mobile-first payment platform undercutting Square at a flat 1.99% per transaction (vs. Square's 2.6% + 10 cents) and signing up tens of thousands of micro-entrepreneurs—mobile barbers & mechanics, private tutors, pop-up shop sellers—across all 50 states. The first major Brazilian fintech to target the US market directly, CloudWalk is betting that software-only distribution, AI-native operations, and low fees through automated efficiency can transfer to the US market where 70M gig workers face the same pain points of high fees and slow settlement that originally created the opportunity in Brazil.
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- CloudWalk (dataset)
- Fernando Sandoval, co-founder of Kapital, on tropicalizing Brex for LatAm
- Karim Atiyeh, co-founder and CTO of Ramp, on the future of the card issuing market
- Geoff Charles, VP of Product at Ramp, on Ramp's AI flywheel
- Art Levy, Chief Business Officer at Brex, on the strategy of Brex Embedded
- Fernando Sandoval, co-founder of Kapital, on stablecoins for cross-border payments
- Kapital: the $72M/year Nubank for SMBs
- Stablecoin diplomacy
- Immad Akhund, CEO of Mercury, on the business models of fintechs vs. banks
- The state of the LatAm startup ecosystem
- René Saul and Fernando Sandoval, co-founders at Kapital, on the fintech opportunity in LatAm
- Anthony Peculic, Head of Cards at Cross River Bank, on building a fintech one-stop shop
- Farooq Malik and Charles Naut, co-founders of Rain, on stablecoin-backed credit cards
- Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Kraken, on building the Nasdaq of crypto
- Kraken at $1.5B up 128% YoY
- Bhanu Kohli, CEO of Layer2 Financial, on stablecoin-backed payments for platforms
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