dLocal Brand Guidelines: A 2016 Montevideo Start-Up, a Unicorn & a Nasdaq Listing

One connection to many local ways to pay.

dLocal was set up in 2016 in Montevideo, Uruguay, as a cross-border payments platform: a single connection through which international merchants could take local payments in emerging markets and send money out to them. English Wikipedia names its founders as Andrés Bzurovski and Sergio Fogel. A June 2023 company announcement describes Fogel as a co-founder who had sat on the board since the company was created, and in August 2023 Sebastián Kanovich, then chief executive, described himself as part of the founding team.

The first markets were in Latin America. The Uruguayan broadcaster Teledoce reported in September 2020 that the company began in 2016 with Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, then added neighbours such as Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia, and in 2017 moved into countries including India, Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria and Indonesia. dLocal’s own timeline counts nine countries at launch, 12 in 2018, 15 in 2019 and 21 in 2020, along with a new API and card tokenisation in 2018 and a merchant dashboard in 2020. The same timeline adds direct issuing in 2021, more than 900 payment methods across more than 40 countries in 2023, and more than 1,000 payment methods across more than 44 countries in 2025.

The idea was to absorb the differences between countries. Teledoce described a platform that let a listener in Uruguay and another in India pay for the same music-streaming service, whether by card, through a cash-payment network or by bank transfer, depending on what was usual where each of them lived. Its clients at the time, the broadcaster said, included Spotify, Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

A unicorn, then Wall Street.

Investment followed quickly. A round led by General Atlantic in September 2020, with the fund Addition also taking part, made dLocal what TechCrunch called “Uruguay’s first unicorn,” the term for a privately held start-up with a very high valuation. In April 2021 TechCrunch reported a further round led by Alkeon Capital, with BOND, D1 Capital Partners and Tiger Global, and described the five-year-old company as serving more than 325 global merchants in 29 countries with more than 600 local payment methods; the customers it named included Booking.com, Dropbox, Uber and Zara. With that round, the publication reported, dLocal named Sumita Pandit, a former fintech banker at JP Morgan, as chief operating officer, and promoted Jacobo Singer, who had held that role, to president.

dLocal then went public. On 24 May 2021 it announced the launch of its initial public offering in the United States and said it had applied to list its Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker DLO. English Wikipedia says the shares began trading on 3 June 2021, making dLocal the second Uruguayan company to reach Wall Street, after StarMedia in the 1990s; the company’s own timeline marks June 2021 as the month it went public.

Leadership changed after the listing. In June 2023 the company named Fogel co-president and chief strategy officer, alongside Jacobo Singer as co-president and chief operating officer. In August 2023 it appointed Pedro Arnt, for twelve years chief financial officer of the Latin American e-commerce group Mercado Libre, as co-chief executive alongside Kanovich, and dLocal’s website now names Arnt as chief executive. English Wikipedia adds that in January 2025 dLocal received an authorised payment institution licence from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, allowing it to take on British merchants through a local entity.

Design and documentation.

Payment processors and wallets present themselves in more than one place at once. A merchant meets them at the counter and in the checkout, a developer meets them in documentation, and an investor meets them on corporate pages about owners and listings. Each of those surfaces carries the brand in a different register.

At the counter, the brand is often a device. Global Payments, for example, described a modular countertop terminal for its Genius platform in November 2025, with a 15.6-inch merchant display, hidden cable management and stand, kiosk and wall-mount configurations, according to its release. Online, the brand shows up as a list of methods: PayU’s European corporate site sorts its offer into cards and digital wallets, online bank transfers, deferred payments and local schemes such as BLIK.

For developers, processors publish their own entry points. PayU’s Indian site links documentation and an API Playground, and its European site links a Developer Portal and a public status page. The Indian site also lists a mobile app SDK, a software kit for adding payments to apps, among its payment products.

Corporate pages tell the ownership story. PayU’s Indian site describes the business as part of Prosus, listed in Amsterdam and Johannesburg and majority owned by Naspers, while Global Payments’ investor site gives its New York Stock Exchange ticker, GPN, and its releases record deals such as the Worldpay purchase completed in January 2026. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, and what its own pages say about its products and markets.

The Local Code, in its own words.

dLocal’s website presents the company with the line “The Local Code” and the phrase “financial technology for markets of the future.” It describes one API, five core products, more than 760 merchants, more than 1,000 payment methods and more than 60 countries; those are the company’s own figures. The products include pay-ins, for accepting local payment methods and currencies, payouts to staff, customers and partners in the currency of their choice, a fraud-management suite, and dLocal for Platforms, launched in 2023 for marketplaces that collect funds and split them between many users.

The company’s about page says dLocal “was born in Uruguay” but that local payment problems reached well beyond its neighbouring countries, and that its coverage now spans Africa, Asia and Latin America, with staff on the ground in every region where it processes payments. English Wikipedia lists offices in Montevideo, São Paulo, San Francisco, London, Tel Aviv and Shenzhen, and says the company named Asia a priority for growth in January 2026. The company writes its name with a lowercase d and a capital L, and this guide follows that spelling.

The about page also sets out the values the company wants to be known for, in short numbered headings: “Customer-driven,” “Ever-evolving,” “Global talent with local expertise,” “We value the difficult” and “We care.” Under the last of these, dLocal says it wants to make paying or being paid within emerging economies as simple as possible, for merchants and their customers alike.

For a design guide, dLocal shows how a payments company can make the word “local” the centre of its name and its message while selling to merchants around the world. Compare EBANX, a payments company from Curitiba in Brazil, and Checkout.com, another processor in this series. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a river clay and warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep dLocal’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.