The modern payment is a small piece of theatre. A thumb meets glass. A wheel spins. A confirmation arrives with the breezy confidence of a maître d' who has already found your coat. The machinery responsible for this little performance is hidden on purpose. Aron Schwarzkopf has made a career of working backstage.
His first company put new hardware on the counter. His second has gone in the opposite direction, deeper into the systems behind the counter, the screen and the bank. Kushki, which Schwarzkopf co-founded with Sebastián Castro, is built around a difficult proposition: make payments across Latin America behave less like a tour of separate bureaucracies and more like infrastructure.
The premise sounds tidy. The region is not. A business moving money through Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Ecuador meets different rules, networks and habits in every market. Cards are only part of the picture. There are bank transfers, real-time rails, wallets and local alternatives, each with its own institutional history. Building one glossy checkout is easy by comparison. Building what lives underneath requires licenses, connections, compliance and the sort of patience that never appears in a product screenshot.
A checkout counter in Cambridge
Schwarzkopf was raised in Quito, Ecuador, and moved to the United States for college. At Babson, he met Castro, another Ecuadorian, while watching soccer. The detail has the pleasing randomness of a good founding story: two compatriots meet far from home, not at a pitch competition but over a match. The partnership would outlast the first company they built together.
His education stretched beyond Massachusetts. Public biographies also place him at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and, later, Singularity University's executive program. The itinerary supplied three different vantage points on commerce: an entrepreneurial school in the United States, study in one of Asia's financial centers, and a program devoted to technologies with outsize effects. No single stop explains his career, but together they fit a founder inclined to see payments as a global system with stubbornly local parts.
Schwarzkopf has said that he encountered payments almost accidentally as he finished university. At 20, he began what became Leaf. The company imagined the point of sale as something more intelligent than a cash register. Its LeafPresenter was a purpose-built Android tablet for merchants, joined to cloud software for analytics, inventory and customer management. In an era full of consumer tablets awkwardly pressed into commercial duty, Leaf made the hardware for the job.
By 2013, Heartland Payment Systems had made a $20 million strategic investment. The attraction was not only the device. Leaf was designed as an open platform, able to connect merchants with outside apps and services. Schwarzkopf described the point of sale as being to a small-business owner what the phone is to everyone else: an everyday operating center, close at hand and full of latent possibility.
The hardware work left a paper trail. Schwarzkopf appears on patents and applications covering a computerized bill presenter, a docking station, transaction systems, loyalty discounts and paperless receipts. They show a young company thinking not only about a prettier register but about the choreography around it: where a device sits, how a transaction passes through it, what the merchant learns and what the customer receives afterward. The later move into infrastructure was larger in scale, but it was not a change of subject.
Heartland acquired the remaining interest in Leaf in 2014. The transaction closed one chapter and supplied an education no university could quite advertise: how money actually moves, how merchants behave and how distribution can matter as much as invention. Schwarzkopf later called the accumulated experience a kind of Ph.D. in payments and startups.
“We realized there was a gigantic opportunity to democratize and create infrastructure to move money.”Aron Schwarzkopf
The return hidden inside an investment tour
After Leaf, Schwarzkopf and Castro turned toward Latin America first as investors. Going from company to company exposed the same obstruction: payment infrastructure was fragmented, old and closed. A startup could have an elegant idea and still become trapped in the prosaic business of simply getting paid. The two founders knew payments, knew the region and had already survived one company together. The coincidence became a thesis.
Kushki began in 2017, with Ecuador as its first operating market. The name means money or cash in Kichwa, an Indigenous language of the Andes. Yet the company was not designed as a digital wallet or a consumer brand. Schwarzkopf's ambition sat a layer lower. Kushki would connect directly to local systems, secure the relevant permissions and expose the result through technology that large enterprises and other payment businesses could use.
There is a useful contradiction here. To become regional, Kushki had to become intensely local. The shortcut was to avoid shortcuts. Teams had to understand domestic regulation, connect with local switches, manage underwriting and compliance, and account for the payment methods people actually used. Only then could an API make the complexity look simple.
By 2020, the company was operating in five countries. An $86 million Series B followed in 2021 at a reported $600 million valuation. In 2022, a $100 million extension carried the private valuation beyond $1 billion, making Kushki the first Ecuadorian technology unicorn. The national distinction mattered, but it also produced a slightly comic outcome: a company celebrated for being highly visible at home had succeeded by making itself largely invisible during transactions.
That same year, Kushki acquired Billpocket, a Mexican point-of-sale company that had spent years building access for smaller merchants and partners. Schwarzkopf saw more than a terminal business. Billpocket had developed the beginnings of a distribution ecosystem in which other software and payment companies could build. It fitted his larger idea of Kushki as a layer that enables other layers.
Launches with Ecuador as the first operating market.
Operating across five Spanish-speaking Latin American countries.
Raises an $86 million Series B at a reported $600 million valuation.
Reaches a private valuation above $1 billion and acquires Billpocket.
Reports non-bank acquiring operations in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia.
The calendar is a product document
Founders are fond of claiming proximity to customers. Schwarzkopf has offered a number. In 2023, he said he had worked to structure his calendar so that roughly 40 percent went to recurring business matters and 60 percent to innovation with customers. It is an unusually revealing ratio. Running payment infrastructure invites endless internal obligation, yet he tries to preserve the larger block for what businesses need next.
His public manner is optimistic without pretending the work is clean. He calls Latin America's payment future bright and, in the same breath, messy. He has described cash-heavy economies as a greenfield rather than an impediment. He speaks candidly about errors, telling one interviewer that mistakes are where the most learning happens. It is not the language of a founder expecting history to proceed in a straight line.
He has also kept a foot in other founders' work. His public record includes mentoring at Techstars, membership in New York Angels and advisory or investment roles with startups. Those connections make sense beside the Kushki strategy. The company is meant to be useful to builders who do not want to spend years becoming payment experts. Schwarzkopf, meanwhile, has spent years helping entrepreneurs understand what sits between an idea and a functioning company. In both cases, the role is enabling rather than starring.
One story captures his preference for evidence over inherited wisdom. A card-network executive told him fraud rates in Latin America were extraordinarily high. Schwarzkopf disagreed and took the conversation into the data. His argument was that poor standardization and neglected infrastructure had been confused with an immutable regional condition. Modern controls and local competence, he said, could change the result dramatically. The anecdote is not merely about fraud. It is about his recurring instinct to treat a supposed fact of the market as an engineering problem.
“I think the future is bright. I think it's a bit messy, because everybody's trying stuff and trying to see what sticks on the wall.”Aron Schwarzkopf
Success would look almost boring
Schwarzkopf lives in Miami with his wife and three daughters, running a company rooted in Ecuador and spread across the region. The geography suits the enterprise: close enough to the United States' capital and technology networks, oriented toward Latin America, and built around constant movement between markets.
His ambition for Kushki remains disciplined. He does not describe a future in which the company chases consumers with another wallet or turns every merchant relationship into a branded experience. He wants large businesses and other payment companies to use Kushki's licenses, infrastructure and local connections, regardless of payment method. In his ideal version, someone building a payments business could connect across the region in a month rather than spend years negotiating the old maze.
That requires technical speed as well as institutional patience. In 2026, Schwarzkopf wrote that Kushki had taken a client's feature request and moved it into production within days, designed and delivered with AI. The tools have changed since the Leaf tablet. The operating impulse has not: take something cumbersome, make it useful, and put it in a merchant's hands quickly.
The founder's two acts now form a neat pair. Leaf tried to turn the checkout into a smarter object. Kushki tries to make the vast machinery behind checkout reliable enough to disappear. One was a thing a merchant could touch. The other is a system most customers will never know by name.
There is no insult in that anonymity. Infrastructure earns its reputation by refusing to become the story. A payment crosses a border. A business accepts a new method. The spinning wheel vanishes and the confirmation appears. The little theatre ends happily, and backstage, the rails hold.