NEW YORK, Jan. 26, 2026 (Globe Newswire) — Messaging has become the primary way people communicate with businesses across the Americas, but the actual act of moving money still happens elsewhere. Payments, identity verification, credit applications, and signatures are routinely pushed to apps, portals, or call centers, creating friction, abandonment, and operational costs. Jelou was built to bridge that gap by turning conversations into actions. Today, the company announced a $10 million Series A to expand Brain, its platform for building AI agents that securely perform real-world business and financial operations within WhatsApp.
Jeru’s leadership team.
The round was led by Wellington Access Ventures, with participation from Krealo, Credicorp’s corporate venture arm, and Collide Capital. Jelou has now raised a total of $13 million in funding, including a $3 million seed round led by Act One Ventures and ArcaContinental Ventures.
The timing reflects a broader shift in how companies interact with their customers. Conversational channels like WhatsApp have become the default interface across Latin America, but most AI tools are limited to answering questions rather than completing transactions. At the same time, enterprises are facing increasing pressure to implement AI that can reduce operational costs, improve transformation, and integrate with existing systems without posing security or compliance risks. Jelou’s approach focuses on execution, allowing AI agents to work within conversations rather than handing off work to fragmented tools.
Jelou’s core product, Brain, is a platform that enables businesses and developers to create and operate AI agents that connect directly to existing systems and perform transactional operations within chats. Through Brain, businesses can deploy agents to communicate with customers via WhatsApp, collect missing information, verify identity, trigger payments, and advance financial workflows using live system data. The platform includes a web-based studio with more than 3,000 integrations to build and integrate agents and a conversation management layer that allows teams to monitor high-volume interactions while securely running workflows such as payments, credit processing, and document signing.
Brain Studio Builder by Jelou.
“Things usually go wrong when customers are most ready to take action,” he said. Luis Loaiza, CEO and Founder of Jelou. “Customers may be redirected from a conversation, put on hold, or asked to repeat between systems. We built Brain to help businesses meet their customers where they are and complete the entire operation securely within the chat. This round allows us to scale that model across America and take conversational AI beyond conversations.”
Jelou builds AI agents that enable businesses to perform financial operations within conversational channels.
The company’s journey began in 2017 in Ecuador. So founder Luis Loaiza and the Geroux team realized that while messaging had become the primary interface for commerce in the region, execution was fragmented and insecure. Leveraging over a decade of experience building messaging and encrypted communication systems, the team set out to turn chat into a place where real business happens. Since then, Jelou has expanded throughout Latin America, processing more than $100 million in financial transactions and serving more than 500 corporate customers in more than 13 countries, including banks, retailers, and consumer goods companies.
Jelou’s traction reflects broader trends toward conversational commerce and agent-driven operations. As AI adoption accelerates, companies are realizing that automation can only deliver value if it is tightly integrated with existing infrastructure and designed for operations from day one. In regions like Latin America, where companies must operate across diverse regulations, payment rails, and systems, the ability to deploy secure and scalable AI within familiar channels has become a competitive imperative.
Jelou recognizes that the future of AI is centered around communication channels embedded in everyday workflows.” 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 a pioneer in bringing transactional AI to messaging in Latin America.”
Looking to the future, Jelou plans to expand Brain into a complete operating system for conversational business, allowing businesses and developers to build, deploy, and manage production-ready WhatsApp applications directly from a prompt. The company’s vision is to make WhatsApp the primary operating layer for businesses across the region, with Jelou providing the platform that powers everything built on top of it.
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About Jeru
Founded in 2017 in Ecuador by Luis Loaiza and Alberto Vera, Jelou builds AI agents that enable businesses to perform financial operations within conversational channels. The company operates in more than 13 countries and serves more than 500 clients across banking, retail, logistics and consumer goods. Learn more at jelou.ai, start building Brain OS at apps.jelou.ai/signup, or follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, or YouTube.
