Doug Storf On Raising ~$30 Million To Build The Leading Banking-As-A-Service Infrastructure Platform For B2B Businesses In Brazil

Doug Storf’s story also captures what it truly takes to build financial infrastructure in an emerging market: resilience, humility, and a deep respect for capital. In this engrossing interview, he discusses the challenges he faced in building, scaling, and raising funding for SWAP.

SWAP has secured funding from top-tier investors including ONEVC and Tiger Global Management.

• Building financial infrastructure in emerging markets demands resilience, humility, and an uncompromising respect for capital.
• True founders move from thinking like consultants to acting like operators who own problems end to end.
• The biggest opportunities often appear when demand is obvious but the supply side is fundamentally broken.
• SWAP succeeded by removing structural friction, not by incremental improvement, rewriting how employee benefits worked in Brazil.
• In startups, everything scales exponentially, including cash burn, which makes capital discipline a survival skill.
• Regulated industries reward founders who partner with regulators to shape healthy, competitive ecosystems rather than fight the rules.
• When data runs out and certainty disappears, trusting your instincts becomes one of the founder’s most valuable advantages.

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About Doug Storf:

Doug Storf is the co-founder and CEO of Swap, a payment platform that helps HR techs, benefits companies, payroll services, expense management, travel management, fleet management and other vertical SaaS to launch their own Fintech.

He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from USP and an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

After completing his master’s degree, Doug spent six years at McKinsey, leaving as a Senior Manager to join 99 as the Director of Strategy in 2017. In this role, he explored entry into the payments sector and helped develop a digital wallet for 99’s drivers.

Besides leading Swap, Doug is also an active angel investor in the Brazilian tech ecosystem, having invested in startups such as Iglu (a Canary portfolio company), Beacon, Quaddro, Teddy, Zarv, Musa, and Kovi.

Connect with Doug Storf:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• Canary

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today we have an amazing founder. We’re going to be learning quite a bit when it comes to building, scaling, financing, and also building a business that really takes a financial infrastructure–type approach.

Alejandro Cremades: What they’ve done is remarkable, because they even had to fire everyone at one point. They ran out of money. I mean, crazy stories that we’re going to be sharing. A very inspiring conversation, so brace yourself for it.

Alejandro Cremades: And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Doug Storf. Welcome to the show.

Doug Storf: Thanks for having me, Alejandro. It’s a pleasure to be here and share some of those stories.

Alejandro Cremades: So give us a walk through memory lane, Doug. Born and raised in São Paulo—how was life growing up for you?

Doug Storf: São Paulo is a huge city, as you know, right? So it’s interesting because you get exposed to a lot of different situations.

Doug Storf: I grew up in one neighborhood, and my school was in a different neighborhood, quite far apart—maybe one hour away. So that exposed me to a number of different situations.

Doug Storf: From being with my grandma in the evenings to going back home and playing in the streets during weekends—it was quite a fun youth.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. Now, obviously, problem-solving has been with you very early on—whether it was studying engineering or going into consulting. Problem-solving has been a big theme. So tell us, where did that problem-solving approach and mentality come from?

Doug Storf: Ah, gosh. I think it’s always been there. Let me share a story with you. It was at the end of high school, and I took on a summer job.

Doug Storf: I worked at a firm where there had been a software update—which back in the day was a big thing. We’re talking 1995 or something like that. Somehow, in that company, all the zip codes got messed up.

Doug Storf: Imagine having 4,000 client addresses and all the zip codes are wrong. I was hired to basically look at a zip code database, update the files, and go back and forth manually.

Doug Storf: Then I noticed what had happened: it had missed the zeros on the left. Very basic software issue.

Doug Storf: Once I realized that, I fixed it using Excel, and in two days my summer job was basically done. So I started looking for other things to do.

Doug Storf: I noticed people were constantly going from their desks to the manager’s desk to use an HP 12C calculator to calculate client payments.

Doug Storf: I thought, “That’s lame. Why does everybody have a computer with Excel in front of them, but still needs to do that?” So I created a very simple Excel template and installed it on everyone’s computer so they could calculate PMTs.

Doug Storf: I was probably 15 at the time. So I think the problem-solving mentality has always been with me.

Doug Storf: Obviously, during college, when I was studying engineering, that went to a whole different level. As an engineer, once you face a very challenging problem, you simplify it as much as you can.

Doug Storf: A car becomes a single dot, and the whole road from here to Santos becomes a straight line. You simplify the problem, solve that sliced-down version with the tools you have, and then recombine everything to solve the more complex problem. I’ve applied this throughout my entire life.

Alejandro Cremades: How do you think consulting—whether it was at Kearney or McKinsey—shaped the way you approached problem-solving? You had engineering, but consulting probably refined it further.

Doug Storf: Yes. The synthesis and analysis I mentioned exist in both engineering and consulting. The difference, and what I learned in consulting, is being hypothesis-driven.

Doug Storf: As an engineer, you tend to think like a scientist, testing alternatives. As a consultant, you work more in a hypothesis-driven way. You come up with a solution you believe is right and then try to prove it wrong.

Doug Storf: With engineering, you test different solutions and see which one sticks.

Alejandro Cremades: You then did your MBA at Michigan, and after that you went through a bit of a rodeo—working at Google and AWS, which was obviously very different back then.

Alejandro Cremades: That probably gave you some comfort in operating roles, which became pivotal when you joined 99. Going through the acquisition with Didi was an immediate step toward bringing Swap to life.

Alejandro Cremades: I’d love to hear what sequence of events happened there, and what you needed to really feel the confidence to venture into the unknown with your own business.

Doug Storf: I’m not sure I ever got to the point of feeling safe—but let’s get there.

Doug Storf: At 99, I had an important shock in my career. As Head of Corporate Strategy, coming from a consulting firm like McKinsey, it should have been an easy transition into the operating world.

Doug Storf: But it wasn’t. I arrived with a consultant mindset, and suddenly all my tools felt inappropriate for the task. What was needed was an operator.

Doug Storf: Even though I was in a strategic role, the company didn’t need PowerPoint. It needed someone to take on real problems and solve them.

Doug Storf: The tools, pace, and approach of a consultant versus an operator are completely different. I spent my first six months spinning my wheels—working a lot, deploying all my tools, but not getting anything done because I didn’t know how to execute.

Doug Storf: It was only after the Didi acquisition that I left the strategic role and said, “Let me create something real.”

Doug Storf: That’s when I started working on launching 99Pay, a wallet for the ecosystem, and truly stepped into an operator role.

Doug Storf: That was the pivotal moment in my career. I had to prove my thesis, sell it to Chinese stakeholders, and build something with limited resources.

Doug Storf: What gave me confidence wasn’t success—it was exposure. Launching the wallet wasn’t a priority for Didi, so I struggled to gain traction.

Doug Storf: At the same time, I saw that the pain points I faced were the same ones my peers were facing across the market.

Doug Storf: Demand was emerging, but solutions weren’t there. I couldn’t find the right partners, and neither could others.

Doug Storf: The opportunity was too big to ignore. You jump in not because you’re confident you’ll succeed, but because it’s too good to pass up.

Doug Storf: That’s how it happened.

Alejandro Cremades: So what happened next? It sounds like Swap was born, but walk us through it.

Doug Storf: This was October 2018. It was a very good year. Didi’s acquisition of 99 created a lot of momentum in Brazil’s VC market.

Doug Storf: Coming out of 99 gave me credibility with investors. It wasn’t hard to get the first check. In December 2018, we raised our pre-seed—PowerPoint-backed.

Doug Storf: One of those classic stories: we were pointing in one direction and found the gold in another.

Doug Storf: A friend of mine was leaving McKinsey to start a company at the same time. I offered him a solution that changed employee benefits in Brazil.

Doug Storf: Traditionally, employee benefits relied on closed-loop systems—your own card scheme and acceptance network.

Doug Storf: It’s expensive to convince both restaurants and companies simultaneously. Coming from a marketplace background at 99, I knew how hard that was.

Doug Storf: So we proposed open-loop cards—Mastercard and Visa—solving the acceptance problem immediately. That acceptance network was the biggest entry barrier in the industry.

Doug Storf: By doing this, we created a new paradigm. That’s how Swap was born.

Alejandro Cremades: For clarity, what is Swap’s business model? How do you make money?

Doug Storf: We built the infrastructure—banking-as-a-service. In Brazil, that means much more than distribution.

Doug Storf: Providers build the infrastructure itself: central bank connections, card schemes, ledgers, wallets, licenses—everything needed for a fully functional transactional wallet.

Doug Storf: Our business model is a take rate on transaction volume.

Alejandro Cremades: You’ve raised about $30 million. What has the fundraising journey been like?

Doug Storf: Easy and hard at different times.

Doug Storf: Initially, it was easy. Good market, good founder story, and a strong initial client.

Doug Storf: Then it became very hard. Pre-pandemic, we tried raising our seed without full metrics or product deployment. Money was running out.

Doug Storf: Then the pandemic hit, and nobody knew where the world was going.

Doug Storf: In 2021, fundraising became easy again—you remember how crazy that market was.

Doug Storf: Now the market is recovering, but there’s a new challenge: AI. If you’re not an AI company, it can be harder to raise.

Doug Storf: Luckily, we’re profitable and generating cash. We don’t need funding to survive.

Doug Storf: But any growth-stage startup with big ambitions may still require new capital.

Alejandro Cremades: I remember you were talking about this during COVID. That was a pretty tough time, when you literally had to fire everyone. The company had to let everyone go.

Alejandro Cremades: How do you think that experience builds you up as a founder?

Doug Storf: Look, it was a tough time. I’m not going to reduce the impact that having to fire everyone has on you.

Doug Storf: Imagine this: you are ten days into COVID. You start lockdown, and ten days later you have to go on Zoom and fire everyone.

Doug Storf: We weren’t used to talking to anyone through Zoom, let alone firing people through Zoom, right? And if you think about the other side of the screen—

Doug Storf: nobody knew how to recruit online. Nobody knew what to do in that setup. So it was really hard to see a group of people who trusted you, who bought into the narrative of building this startup, being let go during the most delicate period of our generation, in terms of human existence and survival.

Doug Storf: It was really hard. It was really emotional. We were all friends.

Doug Storf: Luckily, because nobody had anything else to do and we were all locked down, we stayed in touch. We didn’t know what to do.

Doug Storf: Half of the team accepted a very, very tough offer: staying without a paycheck and receiving some equity in a broken company. But they said, “Well, I don’t have anything else to do, so let me stay around and try to rebuild this company.”

Doug Storf: That’s basically the story of how we managed to navigate that difficult period.

Doug Storf: What changed was that I started respecting capital a lot more.

Doug Storf: I learned that in startups, everything is exponential. Your client acquisition is exponential. Your revenue is exponential. Your traction is exponential. But your cash burn is also exponential.

Doug Storf: It was hard because in December 2019, I had 50% of the money I had raised still in the bank.

Doug Storf: And in March, I had zero. That’s how fast costs scale up as well.

Alejandro Cremades: In that context, one of the things about Swap is that you also need to navigate regulatory changes. How have you been able to do that, and what are some of the key learnings from that experience?

Doug Storf: I once heard Condoleezza Rice say that the regulator’s job is to regulate. They’re going to do that no matter what.

Doug Storf: It’s our role to partner with the regulator and make sure we bring the best quality information to support their decision-making.

Doug Storf: As an engineer, I’ve always favored the approach of, “Give me the rules, and I’ll play within the rules.”

Doug Storf: Before Swap, it never occurred to me that you could influence the rules. But when you operate in a regulated industry, you need to be able to influence them—not to steer them in your favor, but because regulators don’t always have the full picture.

Doug Storf: They’re not in the day-to-day. They don’t see the reality of the market. It’s the role of society to inform the regulator so they can create the right boundaries.

Doug Storf: Regulation needs to be safe for the industry, but it also needs to promote competition and a healthy ecosystem.

Doug Storf: We’ve always stayed very close to the regulator. We participate in debates, and we even founded an association for banking-as-a-service in Brazil.

Doug Storf: That association influenced the regulation that came out in December of last year, and it’s now gaining more representativeness in the market.

Doug Storf: I believe mature industries are the ones that can create dialogue—both among industry players and between players and regulators.

Alejandro Cremades: There’s clearly a lot of vision at play here. The vision you and the team have for Swap is something people need to subscribe to—investors, customers, and employees.

Alejandro Cremades: We saw that during COVID with the people who stayed. And to a certain degree, you also need to enroll regulators.

Alejandro Cremades: So imagine you go to sleep tonight and wake up in a world where the vision of Swap is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Doug Storf: That’s a world where the population, in general, has access to good, tailored, efficient financial services.

Doug Storf: They access those services through the companies they interact with and through the employers that employ them.

Doug Storf: It’s a world where local ecosystems are built around players that have the legitimacy to build those ecosystems.

Doug Storf: It’s not a world where you provide financial services just because you are a bank.

Doug Storf: It’s a world where you provide financial services because you are close to a specific community or ecosystem, and you’re able to develop and deploy products that are truly tailored to it.

Doug Storf: These solutions are better and more efficient. They optimize how capital is allocated, how people receive their money, and how they use it—creating a virtuous circle of prosperity.

Alejandro Cremades: I love that. We’ve talked about the future, but now I want to talk about the past through a lens of reflection.

Alejandro Cremades: Let’s say I take you back in time, to when you were coming out of the Didi offices after they acquired 99 and you helped with the transition.

Alejandro Cremades: You’re walking out with excitement and uncertainty about what comes next. If you could stop that younger version of yourself and give him one piece of advice before launching a business, what would it be and why?

Doug Storf: Believe your instincts.

Doug Storf: The instincts are there, but sometimes we try to muffle them. We don’t listen to them actively. We look for reasons to believe they’re wrong.

Doug Storf: What I would tell my younger self is: believe your instincts.

Doug Storf: As human beings, we are exposed to far more data than we consciously process. Our internal algorithms pick up on very subtle signals that we can’t always articulate, but they’re there—and they’re valuable.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. For the people listening who would like to reach out or learn more about Swap, what can you tell them?

Doug Storf: We have our website at swap.financial. My email is do**@**ap.financial

Doug Storf: Please reach out. I’d be happy to help you build financial products in Brazil.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Doug, thank you so much for taking the time. It’s been an honor to have you on the DealMaker Show today.

Doug Storf: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

*****

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