João Del Valle and the small matter of getting paid

In 2021, the cloud and security team at EBANX asked João Del Valle to disable his access to the company’s code repositories. He had not used them for a few years. This was a reasonable request with a pleasing complication: the person being ushered away from the code had written the platform’s first lines.

By 2026, he was back. “We’re back, baby,” he wrote on LinkedIn, alongside colleagues from the technical team. There was a smile in the announcement, and a small lesson in the reversal. Becoming chief executive had taken him away from the workbench. New technology had given him a reason to pull up a chair again.

Del Valle’s career has travelled through three titles at the same company: chief technology officer, chief operations officer, chief executive. They describe a widening circle of responsibility. The interesting part is what remains inside that circle: a practical interest in getting complicated things to work for people who have somewhere else to be.

A passport before a pitch deck

Curitiba, in southern Brazil, is where Del Valle was born and where he says he still lives. He studied computer science, then went to France for further study. His education includes a master’s in software engineering at École des Mines. Before the company that would occupy much of his adult working life, there was already a career beyond Brazil.

He lived in Mozambique, developing software for government projects. His work there included leading engineers on the country’s national accounting and finance system. He has described the value of living locally in another country, rather than seeing it only from a distance. International experience arrived through ordinary working days, with systems to build and people depending on them.

Telecommunications and finance also formed part of his earlier technical career. These are useful places to learn that a system can be intellectually elegant and still have to answer an unforgiving question: does it work when somebody needs it? A missing transaction invites very little appreciation of the architecture.

When Del Valle later helped build a business around local payment methods, he brought that combination of software training and experience abroad. His future customers would be international companies. Their customers would remain people with familiar ways of doing things at home.

The boleto at the border

EBANX began in Curitiba in 2012, founded by Del Valle, Alphonse Voigt and Wagner Ruiz. The opportunity was wonderfully specific. Foreign merchants wanted to sell to Brazilians. Brazilian shoppers wanted to buy. The checkout did not always provide a payment method the shopper could use.

One answer was the boleto, a Brazilian payment slip that can be settled through local payment points or banks. It was familiar to shoppers and unfamiliar to many international merchants. Del Valle and his partners offered the connection between those two experiences. He supplied the early code; the business combined technical integration with the movement of money across borders.

AliExpress became a customer in 2013. EBANX then had to cope with a twentyfold increase in transaction volume, a forceful invitation to reconsider how the company was organised. Growth had arrived bearing a list of operational requirements.

The founders initially financed the company themselves. Del Valle said it became profitable six months after launch. In a 2018 interview, he offered an order of priorities that reads particularly well beside startup vocabulary: “Let’s create the value of the business and talk about valuation later.”

Three founders, three changing jobs

The valuation caught up in 2019. A follow-on investment from FTV Capital took EBANX above $1 billion, making it a unicorn. The company had entered the Endeavor network in December 2012 and raised its first outside investment years later. Its growth had begun before a financing announcement could supply the headline.

For Del Valle, the years between writing software and becoming CEO involved learning how the service ran. As COO, he worked on the global commercial team and payment integrations. In 2020, EBANX added 50 integrations and payment methods to its business-to-business solutions. Each addition made another local way of paying available to merchants.

On May 7, 2021, EBANX announced his appointment as CEO. Voigt, who had led the business from its founding, became executive chairman. Ruiz moved from finance leadership to chief risk officer. The partnership continued with a different allocation of responsibilities.

Del Valle has explained the operational role in unusually concrete terms. At EBANX, the COO’s remit centres on payments: performance, integrations and getting merchants onto the platform. He had wanted to build the system, operate it and see it run smoothly. The executive progression makes sense when seen from that starting point.

In his telling, the co-founders remained close after moving to the board. Leadership changed shape without requiring the founding story to acquire a new cast.

The world is local at checkout

Ask Del Valle about international commerce and the conversation soon returns to national habits. A merchant can have a recognisable brand and a working website, yet still struggle to collect payment in a new country. Card acceptance alone leaves other payment preferences to be addressed.

The original EBANX proposition joined local acceptance to settlement in the merchant’s home country, with consolidated reporting. That spared an international business some of the work of assembling its own local payment operation. The customer could use a familiar method; the merchant could receive the proceeds abroad.

By April 2026, EBANX was pushing further into Southeast Asia. Del Valle described coverage as a crucial consideration for global merchants. The expansion included Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, with Singapore serving as a regional hub and chief product officer Eduardo de Abreu leading Asian operations.

The financial mix helps explain that ambition. In 2025, countries outside Brazil generated 65 percent of EBANX’s gross profit, compared with 32 percent in 2021. Twenty percent came from outside Latin America. These are figures about the company’s gross profit, rather than a count of its customers or a measure of Del Valle’s personal wealth.

The geographical range had widened. The underlying task was recognisable from the boleto days: understand what people already use, then make that work for a merchant somewhere else.

A second seat, on the other side of the table

Del Valle also appears among Honey Island’s founding partners, alongside Voigt and Ruiz. The investment firm extends the founders’ involvement beyond their own payments company and into younger technology businesses.

Honey Island was created in 2015 with fellow founder Antonio Maganhotte, the CEO of Tecnofit. By 2021 it was preparing a third investment cycle focused on early-stage technology companies. Del Valle explained that the EBANX founders would remain anchor investors while bringing in outside capital.

The support included access to mentors and business partners as well as funding. For founders still validating a product, that offers a different kind of resource: people who have already had to turn a useful technical answer into a functioning company.

There is a related connection at home in Paraná. Del Valle has shared his experience in a mentoring session for LIDE Paraná, discussing the path that took him to the head of EBANX. The engineer who benefited from entrepreneurial networks now has experience to contribute to them.

Guitar, bass, drums. And the day job.

When EBANX introduced its new CEO in 2021, it made room for a detail that would be easy to leave out of a corporate announcement. Del Valle plays guitar, bass and drums, and sings. His colleagues pointed listeners towards an album called Padrões de Projeto.

The title translates as Design Patterns. Software terminology has found its way onto the record sleeve. It is an agreeable detail in a career otherwise described through payment methods, integrations and executive appointments.

The musical sideline also makes the job titles feel a little less complete. CTO, COO and CEO are efficient labels for an organisation chart. They leave out the instruments. His colleagues evidently thought the instruments deserved an introduction too.

In October 2024, Del Valle received TOPVIEW’s financial-market personality award. His response brought the attention back to Curitiba, the community and the team at EBANX. Recognition, as he described it, had value when it could give other people an example to follow.

“Let’s create the value of the business and talk about valuation later.”

João Del Valle · 2018

Back at the workbench

The return to technical work has acquired a specific focus. In 2026, Del Valle described spending a weekend alone in EBANX’s San Francisco office building what he called his personal founder-CEO brain: an AI system intended to connect business information and preserve context.

His description lingered on the relationships between teams, merchants, products and partners. The pleasure seemed to come partly from reviewing how the business fitted together. He also identified access control as a serious unresolved issue. A system containing sensitive organisational knowledge becomes a different proposition when more people can use it.

In an August 2026 conversation with Karen Webster, he said he was watching for competition from outside the established payments industry. If software becomes easier to reproduce, relationships, partnerships and a company’s ability to operate in different countries deserve closer attention.

He had spent several months in San Francisco studying AI. He argued that executives should understand the technology themselves and stay close to operating details. Existing sales and product commitments still had to be met while the organisation learned to change.

That is where the early programmer and the present CEO meet. Del Valle is again experimenting with software, this time with years of operational experience to supply the questions. The job still includes the unglamorous parts: who has access, how the system behaves, whether it serves the people using it.

The code repositories have welcomed him back. The customers, one imagines, will continue to judge the work by whether they can finish paying.