Woz

AI Coding Agents · Fintech

Acquisition

Kapital Acquires YC-Backed AI Coding Startup Woz for $30M

Fintechs are increasingly buying scarce AI engineering talent outright rather than competing for it in the open market.

• Kapital, a Mexico City-based AI-powered B2B fintech, agreed to acquire Woz, a Y Combinator-backed AI coding startup, in a $30 million cash-and-stock deal.
• Woz's flagship product, WOZCODE, uses patented token-reduction technology to make frontier coding models from Anthropic and OpenAI cheaper and faster, saving customers more than $2.5 million.
• Woz's roughly eight-person team, including co-founders CEO Ben Collins and CTO Brad Eckert, joins Kapital as Head of AI and CTO respectively, and the San Francisco engineering team will keep growing.
• The deal closed alongside Kapital's roughly $125-130 million equity-and-debt raise, which pushed its own valuation to about $2 billion, up from $1.3 billion when it first became a unicorn in September 2025.
• Under Collins' and Eckert's technical leadership, Kapital plans to build next-generation AI models for underwriting, risk scoring and financial analytics, expanding its existing OctavIA AI suite.
• The acquisition shows fintechs treating M&A as a hiring channel, paying a premium for scarce frontier-AI engineering talent instead of building coding-agent technology in-house.