Jota Raises $30M Series A: The WhatsApp Message That Might Retire Brazil's Card Machine

Davi Holanda spent six years building the machines other people used to get paid. As part of PagBank's small-business payments team, he helped create more than fifteen products — including the company's entry into card readers and prepaid and credit cards — and rode that business from an early-stage bet through PagSeguro's IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. If you've ever watched a Brazilian street vendor tap a customer's card on a little white machine, there's a decent chance Holanda's fingerprints are somewhere on that product.

Then he left to build his own thing — twice. The first, Bankly, was a banking-as-a-service platform good enough that Méliuz bought it, and later sold it on to Banco BV. The second is Jota, and it starts from an observation Holanda didn't have to research, because he'd spent six years living inside the problem: Brazilian entrepreneurs already run their businesses on WhatsApp. Handwritten ledgers. Cash flow tracked from memory. Invoices sent as voice notes. Nobody had built the operating system underneath any of it.

So Jota didn't build an app people have to learn. It built an AI-native financial assistant that lives where small business owners already are — inside a WhatsApp thread, alongside a dedicated app for anyone who wants one. Say "fala comigo, Jota" — talk to me, Jota — and you can pay a supplier by voice note, check what's in the till by text, or settle an invoice just by sending a photo of the receipt. Money moves the same way a message does: instantly, without opening a single banking app.

That specific, unglamorous insight — meet people where they already are, instead of asking them to change — is what pulled in the fund that led Jota's $30 million Series A. Haun Ventures, founded by Katie Haun (a former U.S. federal prosecutor and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz before striking out on her own), doesn't write many checks in a given year, and had never written one in Brazil. Jota is the company that changed that, closing the round at a $185 million post-money valuation — a serious number for a two-year-old startup, and a clear signal of how much conviction a first-time entrant put behind the bet.

Holanda has spent his career watching Brazilians route around clunky financial infrastructure with whatever tool was already in their pocket. With Jota, he's betting the next decade of Brazilian banking won't live inside an app icon at all — it'll live in the chat window that's already open.

Deal covered in WarZ LatAm VC Monitor — Weekly 27.