A company that gets you paid in places banks make hard
Rebill is the answer to a boring, expensive question: how does a company in San Francisco or Madrid actually collect money from customers in Buenos Aires, Bogota or Mexico City? Usually the answer involves a local entity, a local bank account, a tangle of providers, and a lawyer who bills by the hour. Nahuel Candia's pitch is that you should not need any of it.
As co-founder and CEO of Rebill, he runs a payments-infrastructure platform that lets global businesses process payments, payouts and financial operations across Latin America and the United States without setting up shop locally. Under the hood it stitches together local acquiring, more than 100 payment methods, smart routing, automatic retries, failed-payment recovery and unified settlement - then hides all of it behind a developer-friendly API. The company calls the goal "the financial infrastructure layer for underserved markets." Candia, who still writes code, calls it the thing he wishes had existed every time he tried to sell software across borders.
Rebill was founded in 2020 with Ariel Diaz Ailan, a co-founder with fifteen years in e-commerce. In 2025 Francisco Leon joined as co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer. The team is small - around a dozen or so people, headquartered in Buenos Aires - but the customers are not: Rebill serves fintech, edtech, healthtech, SaaS and direct-to-consumer companies that all share the same headache.
"Rebill got rejected by Y Combinator dozens of times. Then it got in."
— The origin story he keeps tellingPersistence, with receipts
Most founders mention their Y Combinator acceptance and stop there. Candia leads with the rejections - dozens of them, by his own account, before the W22 batch finally said yes. It is a strange thing to advertise. It is also the most honest line in his story, because the rest of his timeline reads the same way: a slow accumulation of "apply again."
He was a Microsoft Imagine Cup regional finalist at fifteen, before he could legally drive. He founded his first company, Shovel Apps, at nineteen - billed, with a straight face, as "the WordPress for mobile apps" - and got it into the MANOS Accelerator in San Francisco. In 2016 he was one of roughly seventy people chosen from more than four thousand applicants across fifty-plus countries for MIT's Disciplined Entrepreneurship program, held that year in Seoul. Then a stint as CTO of Ando.la, a last-mile logistics startup later acquired by Moova. None of it was an overnight win. All of it was an application.
Three companies before thirty. The trick was never quitting between them.
— On building Shovel Apps, Ando.la and RebillBerlin, London, Buenos Aires, Miami
Building a globally distributed payments company means you are always in the wrong time zone for someone. Candia has lived in Berlin and London, holds a UK Startup Visa in his history, and moved Rebill to Britain in 2021 - entering YC about four months later - before moving the team back to Argentina because the time-zone gap was simply too painful to run a company through. In 2025, after fifteen years of trying, he became a US resident, approved under the EB-1A "extraordinary ability" category. He now works from Miami.
The geography is not vanity. A company whose entire reason to exist is cross-border money movement is, fittingly, run by someone who has spent his adult life crossing borders to find the right desk.
Who wrote the checks
Rebill's roughly $3.6 to $3.7 million seed was led by Tiger Global and joined by a roster that is unusually founder-heavy - the people who built the tools other founders use.
Cap table cameo
How it happened
Writes his first lines of code at fourteen.
Microsoft Imagine Cup regional finalist at fifteen; named a Microsoft Student Partner.
Founds Shovel Apps at nineteen - "the WordPress for mobile apps" - into MANOS Accelerator, San Francisco.
Picked from 4,000+ applicants for MIT's Disciplined Entrepreneurship program in Seoul.
Serves as CTO of Ando.la, later acquired by Moova.
Co-founds Rebill with Ariel Diaz Ailan.
Rebill joins Y Combinator W22 and raises a ~$3.6M seed led by Tiger Global.
Rebill launches its cross-border payment gateway.
Ships 1-Click Checkout.
Francisco Leon joins as co-founder & CSO; Candia reaches US residency after fifteen years.
Engineer first, CEO second
Still in the code
He came up through web, mobile, backend and infrastructure engineering. The CEO title sits on top of a cloud architect, not the other way around.
@dncandia
His handle nods to a first name most people never see: Denis. The "D" is the part of the byline he keeps to himself.
Wide curiosity
Lists physics, aerospace engineering and hospitality among his interests, right beside SaaS and fintech.
Built to repeat
Shovel Apps, Ando.la, Rebill. Each one a separate swing. The pattern, not any single hit, is the point.
The infrastructure layer for the overlooked
The aspiration is plainly stated and quietly ambitious: make Rebill the financial infrastructure that any global company reaches for when it wants to operate across Latin America and the US without the fragmented banking, legal and payments mess that usually comes with it. Stripe made getting paid online feel like one line of code in the markets it chose to serve. Candia is betting the same simplicity is worth far more in the markets that got skipped.
It is a builder's bet from a builder who has been applying his whole life. The companies in between taught him the stack. The rejections taught him the patience. Rebill is what he does with both.