For most businesses across the Americas, WhatsApp has become the main channel for customers to ask questions, request support, and initiate transactions, but when action is required, everything breaks.
Payments get pushed to external apps, identity checks jump to portals, credit applications move to call centres, and customers drop off. This fragmentation creates friction, increases operational costs, and leaves companies managing processes that are scattered across tools that don’t talk to each other.
Jelou was built to solve this exact problem. It turns conversational channels into places where real financial operations actually happen. Instead of forcing customers out of the chat, Jelou enables companies to execute payments, verify identity, open accounts, and complete workflows securely inside WhatsApp, removing the disconnect between where conversations start and where business gets done.
Now, Jelou has secured a $10 million Series A round led by Wellington Access Ventures, with backing from Krealo, Credicorp’s venture arm, and Collide Capital, a raise that marks a defining moment for the company’s entry into the U.S. market.
Proven traction across Latin America
Jelou was founded in Ecuador in 2017 by Luis Loaiza and Alberto Vera, who saw early that messaging was becoming the default interface for commerce. Despite high engagement, execution remained inconsistent and often insecure, especially in financial services. Armed with experience in encrypted communication systems, the team committed to making transactional chat both reliable and compliant.
The results speak for themselves. Jelou’s agents have processed over $100 million in financial operations and support more than 500 business customers across 13+ countries, ranging from banks and retailers to logistics and consumer goods companies. The company has now raised $13 million in total, including a $3 million Seed round led by Act One Ventures and Arca Continental Ventures.
A platform built for execution
At the centre of Jelou’s strategy is Brain, a platform designed to help businesses build operational agents that carry out real tasks rather than just provide scripted responses.
The company sees AI apps as the next evolution of business software, moving from standalone tools to fully transactional helpers embedded inside conversations. Through Brain, agents can verify identity, trigger payments, collect missing details, open accounts, and advance credit workflows, all while connecting to a company’s existing systems.
The studio behind Brain includes 3,000+ integrations, enabling developers to build agents that plug into banking cores, payment rails, CRMs, and enterprise software without reinventing infrastructure. A conversation management layer allows teams to supervise high-volume interactions, ensuring sensitive workflows such as payments, underwriting, and document signing run securely and at scale.
With the new funding, Jelou will expand Brain across the Americas and deepen its capabilities around secure transaction execution inside messaging interfaces. It’s an approach that directly aligns with business priorities, such as reducing operating costs, improving conversion rates, and maintaining compliance, without forcing customers into fragmented channels.
Building the operating system for conversational business
Looking ahead, Jelou envisions Brain evolving into a complete operating system for conversational operations. The goal is to enable companies and developers to build production-ready WhatsApp applications directly from a prompt and manage everything, workflows, payments, identity checks, and customer interactions, within a unified environment.
This future points toward WhatsApp becoming the primary operating layer for businesses across the Americas, with Jelou’s infrastructure powering the transactions that keep those conversations moving. As enterprises seek more efficient, secure, and intuitive channels for customer engagement, Jelou positions itself at the forefront of a new era in conversational commerce, where chat becomes the command centre for real business execution.
“When customers are most ready to act, things usually fall apart,” said Luis Loaiza, CEO and founder of Jelou. “They get redirected out of the conversation, put on hold, or asked to repeat themselves across systems. We built Brain so businesses can meet customers where they already are and complete the entire operation securely inside chat. This round allows us to scale that model across the Americas and push conversational AI beyond talk into execution.”
Jelou recognises that the future of AI is centred around communication channels embedded within the everyday workflow,” said Jackson Cummings, Head of Wellington Access Ventures. “They are developing a platform that integrates voice AI, chat AI, payments, and identity into a single application layer. This strategic approach positions Jelou as an early mover in bringing transactional AI to messaging in Latin America.”
