Koywe

Koywe is a financial infrastructure company building cross-border payment rails for Latin America using stablecoins and local fiat networks. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Miami, the company provides a unified API platform that enables businesses to collect local payments, settle in stablecoins or fiat currencies, pay international vendors, and manage multi-currency treasury operations—without needing a separate legal entity or local bank account in every country where they operate.

Founders and Background

Koywe was founded by Ignacio Detmer and Guillermo Acuña, Chilean entrepreneurs who have known each other since childhood—they first met at age five in primary school and later studied together at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Detmer previously served as COO of Americas Car Group, a LatAm automotive marketplace that reached unicorn status before being acquired by Prosus Group. After reuniting following separate careers in high-growth tech, the two identified a persistent gap in Latin American financial infrastructure: cross-border payments that took three to five business days, carried high fees, and required companies to maintain costly local banking relationships in every market.

Koywe entered Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch and has since raised $12.5 million in funding from investors including Y Combinator, Franklin Templeton, and Concentric VC. In July 2026, Detmer and Acuña were selected as Endeavor Entrepreneurs at the organization's international selection panel in Athens, joining a global network of high-impact founders.

What Koywe Builds

The core product is a B2B treasury and payments platform that abstracts the complexity of operating across multiple Latin American jurisdictions. Rather than wiring together disparate local banking relationships, fintechs, payment service providers, and multinational companies integrate Koywe's API once to gain access to:

Local payment collection: Koywe connects directly to the dominant local payment rails in each market. In Colombia, businesses can accept payments via PSE (the national interbank network) and Nequi (the country's largest mobile wallet). In Brazil, the platform supports Pix, including both static and dynamic QR flows. Mexican collections route through SPEI, the central bank's real-time gross settlement system. Chilean acceptance uses Khipu alongside standard bank transfers, while Peru and Argentina are covered through local bank transfer networks.

Stablecoin and fiat settlement: Incoming funds can be settled in local currency or converted to stablecoins—primarily USDC—and held in multi-currency virtual accounts. The platform supports conversion between COP, BRL, MXN, CLP, ARS, PEN, USD, and EUR. Settlement typically occurs the same day, contrasting with the multi-day lag of traditional correspondent banking.

Payouts and vendor payments: Businesses can push payments to suppliers, contractors, or employees across supported markets using the same API, avoiding the need to maintain local bank accounts in each country.

Crypto on/off-ramp: Through Koywe's ramp product, platforms can embed fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat conversion flows directly into their user experience. The company supports USDC, ETH, BTC, and additional assets across eight blockchain networks.

OTC desk and payment links: Larger treasury operations are served through an OTC desk for volume conversions, while the payment links and QR checkout products let merchants accept stablecoin or fiat payments without building a custom checkout flow.

Coverage and Regulatory Standing

Koywe currently operates across Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, and the United States. The company is regulated by Chile's Comisión para el Mercado Financiero (CMF) and registered in Argentina as a PSAV (Proveedor de Servicios de Activos Virtuales) under the Comisión Nacional de Valores. This dual regulatory footing makes Koywe one of the few stablecoin-powered treasury platforms in Latin America operating under formal oversight in two of the region's largest economies. The platform applies end-to-end encryption and anti-fraud monitoring across all transaction flows.

The freemium access model gives businesses an initial $300 transaction limit that expands after completing KYB/KYC verification, lowering the barrier for smaller operators to begin testing the integration before committing to volume.

Partnerships and Ecosystem Position

Koywe has established integration relationships with several major stablecoin and payments networks. Through Circle's Payments Network (CPN), the platform connects to USDC liquidity across Circle's global partner ecosystem. Koywe also participates in Tether's T-0 initiative, extending settlement options to USDT. On the traditional finance side, the company joined Mastercard's Move program and was included in a Mastercard-led stablecoin compliance pilot alongside Borderless.xyz, Infinia, and Walapay—a pilot that tests settlement across networks including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, XRPL, Canton, and Tempo using Circle's USDC and other stablecoins.

The Borderless.xyz integration separately routes Koywe's direct bank connections in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and Colombia into Borderless's single-API platform, allowing financial institutions, payment service providers, and corporate treasury teams to access CLP, MXN, ARS, PEN, and COP order books through a common interface.

Traction

The platform processed over $2 billion in annualized transaction volume as of mid-2026, a figure that reflects accelerating B2B adoption of stablecoin-based settlement in a region where dollar volatility protection and faster cross-border settlement are strong commercial drivers. Koywe reported 5x month-over-month growth at launch in its early YC period.

Developer Experience

Koywe's technical surface is a RESTful API with multi-language code examples, webhook notifications for real-time order status updates, a sandbox environment for integration testing, and a CLI tool for scripted workflows. The API exposes four core flows: PAYIN (inbound collection), PAYOUT (outbound vendor payment), balance transfer (cross-currency conversion between virtual accounts), and crypto ramps (fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat). The platform's documentation is maintained at docs.koywe.com in English, and the company publishes Spanish-language educational content through its Koywe Academy blog targeting B2B finance and operations teams in Latin America.