A WhatsApp Remittance App Raised $200 Million. The New 1% Remittance Tax Touches Only Cash.

Félix, a Miami company that lets people send money to Latin America through a WhatsApp conversation, said on September 1 that it had raised $200 million. The structure is worth noting before the headline number: $87 million is equity, led by Andreessen Horowitz, and $113 million is a credit facility from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund. A credit facility of that size is not growth capital in the usual sense. It is inventory for a lending business, which is what the company says it intends to build.

The round

• Total: $200 million, announced September 1, 2026.
• Equity: $87 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
• Debt: a $113 million credit facility from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund.
• Other investors named: QED Investors, Castle Island Ventures, Switch Ventures, Contour Venture Partners and Endeavor Catalyst.
• Reported operating figures: more than $8 billion in transactions processed, more than 6 million users, revenue up 2.5 times year on year.
• Prior valuation at the Series B was reported as $484.5 million; the new round is described as roughly tripling it.
• Founders: Manuel Godoy and Bernardo García, who started the company in 2020.

Our ambition is to deliver a Goldman Sachs-level financial experience, with the simplicity of a conversation, to people the financial system has historically overlooked.

The stated plan is to move beyond moving money: lending, savings, and what the company calls a cognitive financial companion running inside WhatsApp, plus expansion into further Latin American markets.

The tax that now sits underneath this market

Any company competing for U.S.-to-Latin America remittances in 2026 is operating under a tax that did not exist in 2025. Public Law 119-21, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, added Section 4475 to the Internal Revenue Code. From January 1, 2026, it imposes a 1% excise tax on remittance transfers sent from the United States to a recipient abroad.

The scope is narrower than the headline suggests, and the narrowness is the whole point. The tax applies only where the sender provides cash, a money order, a cashier's check or any other similar physical instrument. A transfer funded another way is outside the tax entirely. The sender bears the tax; the remittance transfer provider collects it at the point of sale and is liable for it if it fails to collect.

How providers actually pay it

• Deposits are semimonthly. The first deposit period was January 1 to 15, 2026, due January 29, 2026.
• Returns are quarterly, on Form 720, the Quarterly Federal Excise Tax Return.
• IRS Notice 2025-55 grants relief from the failure-to-deposit penalty under Section 6656 for the first three calendar quarters of 2026.
• That relief is conditional: the provider must have made timely deposits, even if it calculated them incorrectly, and must pay any underpayment by the due date of the Form 720 for the quarter.

The third calendar quarter of 2026 ends on September 30. After that, the transition relief in Notice 2025-55 no longer covers new deposit periods, and providers that have been getting the arithmetic wrong stop being shielded from the deposit penalty for doing so.

Why the funding method is the interesting line

A 1% levy is small next to the spreads and fees that have historically applied to cash remittances. What matters more is that Congress drew the line at the funding instrument rather than at the transfer itself. A storefront that takes banknotes over a counter is inside the tax and has to build collection, semimonthly deposits and Form 720 filing. A service funded from a bank account or a card is not. That is a compliance-cost difference as much as a price difference, and it falls unevenly across a market where the cash-based storefront has been the default for decades.