The Long Game Behind CloudWalk’s Trillion-Dollar Vision

At the 13th Annual Valor Summit, held at the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream in Washington, D.C., some of the most influential voices in finance and technology in Latin America gathered to explore the future of innovation and global capital. The event featured leaders such as Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Roberto Campos Neto (Nubank; former President of Brazil’s Central Bank), Alexandre Bettamio (Bank of America) and André Esteves (BTG Pactual).

Among the highlights of the day was a fireside chat with Luis Silva, Founder and CEO of CloudWalk, in conversation with Paulo Passoni, Managing Partner at Valor Capital Group. The discussion offered a rare look into the long-term vision behind one of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies.

Paulo Passoni: Luis, two years ago you told me you wanted to build a trillion-dollar company, and people thought it was a joke. Now, CloudWalk has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue. What is the vision for the next steps?

Luis Silva: I remember that. Two years ago, when I said we wanted to build a trillion-dollar company coming from Brazil, everyone laughed. But you said, “No, that’s not a joke - he’s being serious.” Recently, we reached a major milestone: $1 billion in annualized revenue, achieving a 140% CAGR over the last six years. To make the vision of becoming a trillion-dollar company real, the math is simple - we need to grow at approximately 20% CAGR for the next 20 years. So yes, I’m serious about it.

The vision remains the same: to create a global payment network that becomes as well-known globally as we are in Brazil. We’re growing fast in the U.S., and from there, we’ll expand to other countries. We’re in this for the long run, and the next 20 years are going to be fun.

Paulo Passoni: You often talk about “the long run.” In a market that’s usually short-term oriented, how do you turn that into a competitive advantage?

Luis Silva: Let’s define long-term. For me, long-term means 10,000 years. I ask myself how our company, our people, and our society can survive for the next 10,000 years. When you adopt that timeframe, a 20-year plan actually feels short-term. This mindset helps us focus on the fundamental shifts that short-term thinkers often miss.

Take AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), for example. If you only look at the next quarter, you miss the big picture. We constantly ask ourselves what the impact of AGI will be in 5, 20, or 100 years - how it will change governments, education, and the daily lives of our customers, the small sellers. Having such a long timeframe forces us to build the infrastructure today that will still be relevant in a radically different future.

Paulo Passoni: Shifting to culture - what kind of people do you hire to build this future?

Luis Silva: We hire super smart people, but we define “smart” differently. It’s not just about who went to Harvard or Yale - those folks are brilliant, of course - but we look for raw, non-obvious talent. I went to public school; I never attended college. I jumped from high school straight into opening my first company at 21. And like me, there are thousands of people out there. My strategy is to identify those people early, invite them to join our journey, and train them to grow inside the company - becoming future leaders, directors, and partners of the organization.

Paulo Passoni: You’ve described your team environment as “chaotic.” What do you mean by that?

Luis Silva: It is chaotic. If you walk into our offices, you’ll see engineers sitting with psychologists, artists, and finance experts. This mix is intentional because it brings completely different perspectives to decision-making. That “chaos” is where real innovation comes from - it gives us an edge in solving customer problems in ways traditional companies simply can’t.

Paulo Passoni: Why build your AI technology in-house instead of just using third-party providers?

Luis Silva: When you build everything in-house, it’s much easier and faster to control the experience you deliver to customers. Sometimes, when you rely on AI APIs from other providers and start scaling quickly - as we are - you inevitably run into challenges.

That’s when we go back to first principles: why do we need to do this, and how are we going to make it happen? Let me give you an example. Our AI agent - JIM in Brazil and JIM.com in the U.S. - runs on our own GPU cluster, fine-tuned using an open-source model. We are building right now the largest GPU cluster constructed by a Latin American company. We’re using it to fine-tune existing models and to train new ones from scratch. These models will power all customer interactions with our AI agents.

That doesn’t mean we don’t use OpenAI or Anthropic - they’re great, by the way. We use them for testing, and they perform very well. But when it comes to the core experience and direct customer interaction, we build everything ourselves.

Paulo Passoni: Some traditional jobs will be replaced by AI and AGI. Humans will evolve - they’ll find new things to do. I can’t think of a company better positioned than CloudWalk to embrace that vision. But looking at your customers, how is AI actually impacting them? What do they need?

Luis Silva: AI helps us offer exactly what our customers need - and how they need it. Many of them are small business owners who need credit and real-time access to money to keep growing. Cash flow is critical as they launch new products, expand, and often juggle formal jobs while building their own businesses. Providing great AI tools is essential to help them navigate that journey, from smarter financial solutions to personalized support.

Our AI agent, JIM, acts like an extra employee - creating marketing campaigns, managing cash flow, and defining pricing - helping millions of entrepreneurs boost their sales and focus on what really matters. These small entrepreneurs have very different needs compared to traditional B2B clients, which is why we stay humble and focused on serving them.

Paulo Passoni: You’re expanding into the U.S. with JIM.com. How is that going compared to your start in Brazil?

Luis Silva: The U.S. market is ten times bigger than Brazil, but marketing is also much more expensive. Currently, we have tens of thousands of customers across all U.S. states and are generating millions in revenue. The interesting part is that if you compare it to 2019 - when we were doing just a couple of million dollars in Brazil with InfinitePay - we’re actually moving faster in the U.S. now than we were back then. We’re applying the same playbook: serving small entrepreneurs that big players overlook, helping them solve cash flow problems in real time, and using AI to help them sell more.

Paulo Passoni: So, we see your business growing really fast and your vision for the future. When is the right time to give back?

Luis Silva: Every day. My personal cause is education. We partner with Alpha Edtech, a program that trains incredibly smart people who haven’t had access to traditional education. They study for a year, and then we hire them. I do this because it’s good for business, but also because it feels like time travel - it’s my way of sending a message back to the 15-year-old version of me, giving others the opportunity I wish I had back then.