Founded by ex-Uber and DiDi alum Shanxiang Qi, and Mk Li, a former VC who began his career at Google, followed by Microsoft Silicon Valley, California-headquartered Liquido has spent the last two years building a payments infrastructure to modernize digital payments access for Latin American businesses, similar to what Stripe built in the US.

The company has already processed more than $300 million in payments through a closed beta with several top consumer brands, utilising a unified and integrated API for merchants to accept and process all forms of payment - from credit and debit cards to bank transfers to digital wallets, and even cash.

Additionally, Liquido debuted Payment Plus Platform (PPP), which runs on top of its core payment services, enabling clients to build Shopify-like storefronts on popular media platforms, beginning with a shop window for WhatsApp. Using the platform, customers can display merchandise, process payments and explore new ways of conducting business, such as hiring crowdsourced community sales representatives, running promotional events for loyal customer groups, and creating group buying experiences.

To improve conversion rates, a 'Payments Success Booster' on PPP enables customisable fraud flagging and transaction blocking, WhatsApp payment recovery, flexible payment method switching, and smart routing and retrying.

Says CEO Li: “While developing our PPP narratives, invaluable insights and new possibilities have come from our pilot users. For example, an early adopter launched Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns with direct click-through to their branded WhatsApp Liquido Store. Innovative usage like this validates our direction and fuels our determination to provide the solutions our customers and users deserve in this vibrant economy.”