He grew up in Guatemala. Attended the American School of Guatemala, which gave him distinguished honors and a bilingual upbringing. Moved to California for Stanford, where he enrolled in Symbolic Systems - the university's rare interdisciplinary program that mixes computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy into a single degree. The program is built around one question: how does intelligence work? Perdomo spent four years sitting inside that question. It shaped everything that came after.
After graduating with distinction in 2016, he joined LinkedIn as a product manager, working on new content formats and SlideShare. Then came Affirm. From late 2018 to mid-2020, Perdomo worked on Affirm's checkout product and growth marketing platform - front-row seats to how buy now, pay later was rewriting the psychology of online purchase decisions. He watched BNPL solve the installment problem. He noticed it left something untouched: rewards.
"The buy now, pay later model addressed the installment payments. At Catch, we're tackling the rewards side."
- Nico PerdomoIn 2020, he left Affirm and co-founded Catch with three others: Vijay Singh, who had also come from Affirm and became CTO; Denia Ebersole, a Google alumna who took the COO role; and Whitney LaRow, Chief Architect, formerly of Granular. Four friends, four Stanford alumni, one thesis: every payment transaction should reward the buyer rather than line the pockets of Visa and Mastercard.
The mechanics of Catch were elegantly simple. A shopper connects their bank account at checkout on a partner brand's direct-to-consumer site. They pay like they would with a debit card or ACH transfer. The brand saves on interchange fees - the processing tax that typically runs 1.5% to 3.5% per credit card transaction - and routes a significant slice of those savings back to the customer as store credit. Minimum 5%. Often 10%. No points. No tiers. No expiration fine print that actually means "six months." Direct dollar value, spendable within five days, shareable with friends and family.
"Interchange is just a tax that big banks and payment companies have used to fund their own loyalty programs."
- Nico PerdomoThe pitch to investors was almost counterintuitively straightforward. Sequoia's Alfred Lin - the investor behind Airbnb and DoorDash - backed the company in 2020. Index Ventures and Forerunner Ventures followed. Then came angels from the founder class of Affirm, Warby Parker, Allbirds, Casper, and DoorDash. The DTC brand-building generation put money behind a startup designed to make DTC brand loyalty actually work.
The brands that signed on read like a curated window of Gen Z commerce: PacSun, Everlane, SoulCycle, Rare Beauty, Kosas, Ouai, Summer Fridays, Girlfriend Collective, Good American, Bala, Living Proof. The demographics told a sharp story. Catch users were predominantly 18-34, primarily female, optimizing for value on purchases in the $50-$250 range - the exact sweet spot where debit rewards made a compelling case against credit. Average transaction size: $100.
"Our thesis behind Catch is that everyone buying a product has to pay. Why don't we make that moment extremely delightful and give that customer something back right when they pay?"
- Nico PerdomoThe results for merchant partners were unusually concrete. Ouai saw a 38% repeat purchase increase and a 3.3x ROI. PacSun recorded a 92% surge in repeat purchases and a 55% second-purchase rate. Catch-wide, partner merchants averaged 43% faster repurchase rates and 46% higher customer retention. The underlying mechanism: customers who earn store credit have a built-in reason to come back and spend it, creating a replenishment cycle particularly suited to beauty and apparel - precisely the categories Perdomo had identified early as the platform's natural home.
Perdomo spoke about Gen Z purchasing psychology the way a former Symbolic Systems student would - through behavior, incentive structures, and the cognitive weight of loyalty programs. At the 2024 WWD Beauty CEO Summit, he shared data showing that 95% of Gen Z consumers use fewer than five loyalty programs at any given time. That number is not a constraint. It is the operating condition. "There's a lot of noise out there," he said. "Positive affinity for a product has never had such a short life - and it's only getting shorter." The brands that win are the ones who use payments to create micro-moments of delight, not months-long point accumulation games.
In November 2023, Catch hosted a cocktail reception at The Golden Swan in New York's West Village. About 100 executives from beauty and retail showed up. It was the kind of event that signals a company reaching critical mass as a category idea - not just a product. Perdomo stood in a room of brand founders and operators and made the case that alternative payment systems were no longer a fintech curiosity but a retention tool.
The company had been pursuing an in-store expansion to complement its e-commerce presence, aiming at an omnichannel payment experience that would bring the Catch rewards mechanic into physical retail. By early 2023, merchant count had more than doubled. The user base was targeting one million within 18 months. The ambition was clear.
Catch ceased operations in April 2025. Five years after founding, the platform that had rewarded hundreds of thousands of Gen Z shoppers across a network of nearly 100 DTC brands went quiet. What it leaves behind is a detailed proof of concept: that debit-based rewards could move purchase metrics at scale, that Gen Z would opt in if the value was immediate and transparent, and that the credit card rewards system had a real alternative waiting if the unit economics could hold.
Perdomo's background in Symbolic Systems - a degree built around understanding intelligence itself - was perhaps not an accident. He approached payments as a human behavior problem before he approached it as a technology problem. The insight that the act of paying was an underutilized moment of delight was, at its core, a cognitive observation: people respond to immediate, concrete rewards, not deferred abstraction.
He was also working on the Guatemala problem all along. In parallel with product work, he found time to help fundraise for organizations fighting chronic malnourishment in Guatemala and serve as an English-Spanish interpreter on a construction mission to Sololá, helping install cookstoves in impoverished households. The through-line - systems thinking applied to human outcomes - is consistent whether the domain is debit payments or subsistence cooking.