DEUNA, the commerce operating system that enables a “1-click checkout” buying experience and a sales network for digital commerce merchants, has raised $37 million in funding including a $30 million Series A round.
The investment round was led by Activant Capital along with contributions from Valor Capital, Abstract Ventures, Acrew Capital, Upload Ventures (previously Softbank Early Stage) and company founders from Plaid, Kavak, Jeeves, Xepelin, iFood, R2, and others.
Established in 2020, DEUNA supports digital commerce merchants so they can carry out online sales in LatAm more efficiently.
Their commerce 3.0 operating system offers domestic merchants with a robust payments infrastructure that integrates into various payments provider (including PayPal, Kushki, Mercado Pago, etc), alternative payment methods widely-used in the region (Kueski, Aplazo, Oxxo, Baloto, etc) and offers access to a network of more than 3 million users to accelerate sales and increase conversion.
The platform takes care of payment orchestration, payment processing, fraud prevention, and life cycle management based on “actionable” user real time analytics, all of which are vital to the success of digital commerce merchants in Latin American markets.
Latin America is notably one of the fastest-evolving digital commerce markets, growing over 30% every year.
Historically, digital commerce in the LatAm region has been impacted by challenges such as customer acceptance, conversion, and fraudulent activities.
The solution to these obstacles involves creating a new commerce ecosystem, Commerce 3.0, which depends on integrated, API-driven tools that are able to address these issues while offering a seamless user/seller experience.
In Latin America, the market opportunity for developing Commerce 3.0 players is larger that of the United States, where fraud tech and market acceptance have matured.
Jose Maria Serrano, co-founder of DEUNA, said:
“Our product will flip e-commerce in the region. We designed the first fully functional solution for vendors to truly enable a 1-click checkout experience. This is the front door to commerce 3.0 for our clients. DEUNA solves the conversion, fraud, and acceptance rate challenges with a single integration.”
Company co-founders Roberto Enrique Kafati Santos and Jose Maria Serrano have reportedly spent the past few years supporting the business in stealth mode, implementing next-gen tech to allow for an enhanced buying experience with around 3X greater conversion rates.
Having grown 120x this past year, the firm works with major clients like KFC, Pappos, Dunkin Donuts, for whom they are delivering as much as 6X growth in overall online sales.
As noted in the update, the Series A round comes off the back of a $7 million seed round in October 2021.
David Yang, Partner at Activant Capital, said:
“DEUNA’s one-click checkout will be a game changer for LatAm’s nearly $100bn e-commerce market, helping address the region’s lower payment acceptance rates, higher fraud rates, and lower card usage rates. We have been very impressed with Roberto and Jose Maria’s vision and experience as well as DEUNA’s traction to date. We’re excited to partner with them as they build the leading ecommerce infrastructure platform and network in the region.”