Visa-backed Brazilian card-issuing platform Conductor raises $150 million

São Paulo, Brazil-based payments fintech Conductor Technology has raised $150 million in a private equity round led by Viking Global Investors.

Joining Viking Global in the fundraising was by Advent International’s affiliate Sunley House Capital. The new shareholders have joined the company’s existing institutional investors, Riverwood Capital and Visa. The funds will be used to accelerate product development and continue its international expansion across Latin America. In July, Conductor acquired Muxi, a Latin American POS terminal provider. At the time of the Muxi acquisition, Conductor reported having annual sales of 400 million reals (about $70 million).

“The company’s mission is to modernize and democratize the payments stack in Latin America,” Antonio Soares, Conductor's CEO, said in a press release. “We have grown our business 10x in the past few years, and we are just getting started. With this injection of capital, we will accelerate our product investment to unlock the massive opportunity ahead in Brazil and across Latin America.”

Visa made a strategic investment in Conductor in 2018 to help the startup expand issuer-focused solutions for tokenizing payments through mobile wallets, improving access to Visa APIs, expanding the usage of push payments with Visa Direct and increasing acceptance of digital payments among small businesses.

Conductor serves banks, fintechs, retailers and enterprises with its cloud-based, open API platform that provides card issuing and processing, as well as banking-as-a-service in Brazil and Latin America. The company processes $20 billion annually for its 85 million registered accounts, of which 30 million are considered active. Conductor claims that it handles 1.5 billion transactions per year with a peak of authorization at 500 transactions per second in current production.

According to Report Linker, Brazil’s credit card penetration rate is among the highest in Latin America and has been showing strong growth as a result of the growth in e-commerce.