Gustavo Mapeli (Kanastra) on the $300B Market Built on Excel—And the Startup Replacing It

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️

This week, I sit down with Gustavo Mapeli, co-founder and CEO of Kanastra — one of the fastest-growing fintech infrastructure companies in Latin America. Gustavo started out building a traditional asset manager focused on private credit and wealth outside of Brazil’s core markets. But after feeling the pain of operating in a fragmented, manual, and outdated system, he made the bold decision to build the infrastructure he wished existed — and Kanastra was born.

Today, Kanastra powers over R$13B in assets across 150+ credit and securitization facilities — and has raised capital from top investors like Kaszek and QED.

Here’s what we cover:

♢ How Brazil became fertile ground for fintech infra – Why regulation, wealth decentralization, and embedded finance created the perfect storm.

♢ The contrarian decision to go multi-product from day one – And why Gustavo believes they had no other choice.

♢ How Kanastra is winning in a concentrated, low-tech market – Tactics for building trust, reputation, and distribution in a system built on inertia.

♢ Hiring and culture in high-performance teams – Why Gustavo believes the best cultures are the most exclusive.

♢ Founding with conviction – The story of Gustavo and his co-founder’s 15-year friendship, and how they’ve built what he calls an “unbreakable” partnership.

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