Kapital, a Latin American financial group that calls itself an AI-powered financial institution, said on October 19, 2026 that it had agreed to acquire Woz, a San Francisco company that builds tools for AI-assisted software development. Kapital will pay $30 million in a mix of cash and stock. The announcement, datelined Mexico City, did not give the split between cash and shares or a date for closing.
Woz co-founders Ben Collins, its chief executive, and Brad Eckert, its chief technology officer, will join Kapital as head of AI and chief technology officer respectively. Woz's AI development team will move with them, and Kapital said it expects the San Francisco team to keep growing over the next year. The release did not say whether the Woz brand or its WOZCODE product will continue to be sold separately.
The deal was not entirely new. Forbes México reported the purchase in early October, and Dealroom, citing that report, wrote on October 5 that Kapital had bought Woz for $30 million while raising new money that lifted its valuation to $2 billion. Spanish-language sites Latam Fintech Hub and Descubre.vc also covered it. The October 19 release is the companies' formal announcement.
What Woz built
Woz was founded in 2024 and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, according to its YC profile, which lists a team of eight people in San Francisco and Tom Blomfield as its YC partner. Its main product, WOZCODE, is a plugin for Anthropic's Claude Code. It adds custom tools meant to cut the amount of context and the number of tokens a coding agent uses. Kapital's release said the product relies on what Woz calls patented token-reduction technology and is designed to make frontier coding models from Anthropic and OpenAI faster and cheaper to run.
The company makes several performance claims that have not been independently checked. Its YC profile says WOZCODE costs 25% to 55% less than using Claude Code alone and finishes most coding tasks 30% to 40% faster. The release says customers have saved more than $2.5 million since launch, but gives no detail on how that figure was calculated.
WOZCODE was not Woz's first product. When it raised seed money in 2025, the company presented itself as an "AI App Factory" that built production mobile apps for non-technical businesses, using specialised AI agents supervised by human engineers. It later moved to the developer plugin.
“Acquiring Woz will bring Kapital's already sophisticated AI platform to the next level, propelling us further as a leader in AI development for the global banking system and enterprise financial operations.”
The founders and the funding
Collins and Eckert met as engineering students at MIT and have known each other for more than 13 years, according to YC. Eckert previously founded and led an engineering team of more than 30 people at Cairns Health, formerly Totemic, a company from YC's Summer 2017 batch. He has also worked on deep-learning radar products for consumer electronics and on an insomnia treatment that uses a large language model, and he is a co-author on more than 25 patents.
Woz raised a $6 million seed round led by Cervin Ventures, which the investor announced on October 15, 2025. Pulse 2.0 reported that Burst Capital, Y Combinator, Untapped Ventures, MGV and the Lacob family, co-owners of the Golden State Warriors basketball team, also took part. Cervin sits on both sides of the deal: it also invested in Kapital's most recent financing.
Why Kapital is buying
Kapital says it is one of the largest business-focused financial institutions in Latin America and operates in Mexico, Colombia, Spain and the United States. Dealroom, citing Forbes México, reported that it serves more than 300,000 clients, employs about 3,700 people, also operates in Puerto Rico and spends about 30% of its budget on research and development. Chief executive René Saúl told Forbes México that Kapital is a technology company with a banking license rather than a traditional bank.
According to the release, Kapital plans to combine Woz's engineering with its own data and platform to build new AI models for financial applications used by businesses. That work will build on OctavIA, Kapital's existing suite of AI tools. Collins pointed to the size and quality of Kapital's financial data as a reason for the move, while Saúl said the purchase would raise the level of Kapital's AI platform.
New money and a higher valuation
The acquisition comes shortly after a new funding round. Kapital's release said it announced $125 million in financing in September 2026, led by Tru Arrow Partners and Fasanara Capital, with Cervin Ventures, Niya Partners and Overlook Capital also taking part. Forbes México, as cited by Dealroom, gave a figure of $130 million in equity and debt and put Kapital's valuation at $2 billion. The two amounts differ, and the release did not mention a valuation.
Kapital first reached a valuation of about $1.3 billion in September 2025, according to Dealroom. Latam Fintech Hub, citing Forbes México, reported that the company is considering a stock market listing within three years. Kapital said it will use the new funds and the Woz deal to expand in Mexico, the United States and other markets.
