In 2018 Eduardo Pontes left Rio de Janeiro for London. He told a Brazilian magazine he went there "to learn and try to do something new." He was 40 and already rich, yet he turned up to a Central Bank event in Brazil in jeans and a T-shirt.
Pontes had spent fifteen years building payments businesses with his partner André Street. They built Braspag in 2004 and sold it to Grupo Silvio Santos. In 2013 they launched Stone, where Pontes was the technologist. He worked out that Brazil's patchy data networks were the real enemy of the card machine, and he pushed for a terminal that used as little data as possible. Colleagues described him as stubborn and obsessive about detail, and as someone who avoided the spotlight.
Pontes stepped in to help lead it, with Marcos Nunes, a former Bambora executive.
In 2019 he started again in London. SaltPay was set up with Ali Mazanderani, who became chairman, and it was meant to be a Stone for Europe: card terminals, software and customer tools for small shops. It stayed independent of Stone. By August 2020 it had about 500 staff and offices from England to Croatia, Iceland and South Africa.
The first big move was odd. In July 2020 SaltPay, Street's investment vehicle and the Lemann-backed LTS Investments bought 96 percent of Borgun, an Icelandic card acquirer with roots in the country's first payment card company, for 27 million euros. Borgun's chief executive and some directors left straight after. Pontes stepped in to help lead it, with Marcos Nunes, a former Bambora executive. An investor described the plan as a turnaround.
Then the money arrived. In November 2021, with Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital, GIC and Michael Spencer among the backers, SaltPay raised a Series C reported at roughly 400 to 700 million dollars, depending on the account, at a valuation that reports put near 9 billion dollars. It bought businesses across Europe with it, including Paymentology, Storyous and Yoyo.
The reset came with a new name. On 4 April 2023 SaltPay became Teya, promising next-day settlement, simple pricing and no long contracts. The pitch has widened since to business accounts, credit and Tap to Pay on iPhone, and in February 2026 the company launched in Spain and Italy taking it to nine European countries. It has about 75,000 customers and more than 200 staff in its UK arm. Turnover in its latest UK accounts was 19 million pounds for 2024, more than double the year before, while the pre-tax loss shrank from 110 million to 64 million pounds. Dealroom puts its value at 2.4 billion dollars in November 2026.
The lesson in Pontes's story is that a second company is rarely a copy of the first. He took a playbook from Brazil, bought a struggling acquirer in a small country, and spent his pile of capital on making it big enough to matter.