When Headline partner Romero Rodrigues got an inbound for the São Paulo, Brazil-based payment processing startup Pismo in 2016, it was good timing. Rodrigues had been mapping out the payments sector—on the lookout for a company that would try to tackle some of that sector’s infrastructure problems.
In a following meeting, Rodrigues tells Fortune the team was an easy sell: Engineer Daniela Binatti—who fervently believed that rapid product turnaround times at newer banks were going to threaten incumbents, according to Rodrigues—had convinced her former boss, Ricardo Josua, to pause his retirement plans and build a company that would help these banks keep up. Later Binatti’s husband, Marcelo Parise, and sister, Juliana Binatti, would get on board, too.
