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Why is it still so hard and so expensive to send money across borders?

That is the question Enrique Perezalonso and his team at Palla are working to solve.

Palla, based in Miami, is now embedded in more than 30 financial institutions across Latin America and the Caribbean. With its $14.5 million Series A round led by Revolution Ventures, the company is aiming to push even further – streamlining how money moves between people, countries, and currencies.

Perezalonso and his team built Palla not as a consumer-facing app, but as an infrastructure layer. “Banks create embedded payment links within their own apps – fully branded and seamless to their customers,” Perezalonso, Palla’s CEO and co-founder, told Axios. It’s a Zelle-like experience, but for international transfers. And crucially, it’s the banks who own the relationship with the end user, not Palla.

That behind-the-scenes approach is what caught the attention of investors like David Golden, managing partner at Revolution Ventures. “[This approach] dramatically drops your customer acquisition costs, so you can be a lower-priced, lower-cost provider without having to light money on fire acquiring customers,” he said. In a world where many fintechs burn cash trying to grow, Palla’s model flips the script.

By embedding directly with banks and fintechs through APIs and white-label solutions, Palla lets end users move money in real time, often over existing debit card rails. The company earns revenue through transaction fees and FX spreads, but it does so with slim margins. 

“We’re making maybe from 1% to 1.5% markup on FX, which is very competitive compared to the 8% charged by many cash-based remittance options,” said Perezalonso [pictured above].

The company’s new backers aren’t small names either. Alongside Revolution, participants in the round included Y Combinator, Cowboy Ventures, Ardent, Dash Fund, DeepWork Capital, and others. And with the raise, Palla’s board is getting heavy reinforcement: Heidi Miller, the former JPMorgan International president and a board member at HSBC and General Mills, is joining. “Heidi was in Jamie Dimon’s kitchen cabinet at JPMorgan. She knows where all the bodies have been buried in moving funds around,” Golden said.

Even with the funding secured, Palla isn’t slowing down. Its next step? Europe-to-Latin America corridors, new money-movement methods like Brazil’s Pix, and potentially stablecoin-based transfers. 

Golden admitted they weren’t looking specifically for a Latin America play. “We’re solving for where we can exploit inefficiencies, where we anticipate growing financial-purpose traffic in remittances. They’re focused on LatAm because of the team’s background,” he said.

The vision is clear: real-time, global payments that don’t feel like a wire transfer from the ‘90s.

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