When Edrizio De La Cruz sold his last company, Arcus, to Mastercard, he didn’t exactly take a victory lap. Instead, he started sketching out his next big move. Alongside co-founders José Alberto (Beto) Díaz García and Camilo Jiménez Fuentes, he quietly built a payments infrastructure platform that blends stablecoins, artificial intelligence, and enterprise-grade APIs. They called it Kira.
For more than a year, Kira operated in stealth, testing and refining a product that its founders believe can serve as the backbone for the next generation of financial services.
Now, the Miami-based startup is announcing that it has raised $6.7 million in seed funding to take its vision public, led by Blockchange Ventures, Vamos Ventures, Stellar Blockchain, Grit Ventures, Credibly Neutral Ventures, Michael Seibel, and Oso Trava.
The money will fund Kira’s expansion across Latin America, starting in South America, as well as hiring for its technical team and rolling out new products. The company is building what it calls an “all-in-one API” that enables enterprises and startups alike to quickly launch embedded fintech services, ranging from payments and remittances to savings and payroll.
“This funding allows us to accelerate building the infrastructure, starting in Latin America needs to compete in the global digital economy,” De La Cruz shared in a statement. “Our vision is to leverage stablecoins and AI to provide modern financial services to the 1 billion underbanked.”
That vision resonated with investors. Rob Schmults, General Partner at Blockchange Ventures, framed the opportunity as transformative.
“Bringing blockchain powered financial services to any enterprise is a potentially massive new category of business,” Schmults commented. “The team at Kira was not only well positioned to have seen this, but bring an ideal combination of experience, expertise, and connections to actually make it happen.”
Stellar Development Foundation’s participation highlights the technical underpinnings of Kira’s platform. Leveraging Stellar’s blockchain allows for faster, cheaper payments – critical for remittances and cross-border use cases in emerging markets. Meanwhile, Vamos Ventures and Oso Trava bring regional expertise and networks that could help Kira crack one of the toughest challenges in fintech: scaling across Latin America’s fragmented financial landscape.
For De La Cruz, the mission is personal. He has long been outspoken about the inefficiencies facing Latin American consumers and businesses when it comes to money movement. By combining AI-powered agents that can automate compliance and treasury workflows with the stability of blockchain-based assets, Kira aims to remove much of the friction that has kept financial innovation unevenly distributed.
The startup has already generated $3 million in revenue in its first year, according to the company. Now, it’s setting its sights on forming partnerships with banks and payment processors to cement its infrastructure as a core layer in the region’s digital economy.
Whether Kira can become the connective tissue for Fintech 3.0 in Latin America remains to be seen. But its founders – veterans of Arcus, Clip, Stori, and Littio – are betting that the combination of AI and stablecoins will rewrite the rules of how money moves across borders. And with new investor backing, they now have the capital to try.
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