Brazilian Divibank raises US$3.6 million with heavyweight US funds BTV and Village Global
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In 2019, Colombian Jaime Taboada landed in Brazil after working for 5 years at Goldman Sachs in New York.
Interested in entrepreneurship in Latin America, he joined the Maya Capital fund, founded by Lara Lemann and Mônica Saggioro, to better understand market opportunities. While helping investors analyze businesses, he noticed a pattern: startups were looking for funding to finance digital marketing strategies. “It’s a high capital cost to invest in campaigns, it didn’t make sense,” says the entrepreneur.
When he met Brazilian Rebecca Fischer, former director of marketing company Kenshoo, his concerns turned into a business. Together, in March 2020, they founded fintech company Divibank, specialized in financing digital marketing campaigns for startups and small businesses.
Inspired by the unicorns Pipe (USA) and Clearbanc (Canada), Divibank built a credit model in which customers pay a monthly percentage of their revenue – which can vary from 1% to 12% – until they pay off the debt. These loans, which can range from R$5,000 to R$2 million, are deposited directly into customers’ digital marketing accounts on Google and Facebook platforms. Since its foundation, the company has had R$83 million in credit requested and served over 50 companies over the past 6 months alone.
Now, in order to scale up the operation, the company announces it has received a US$3.6 million (R$20 million) investment led by the American fund Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV), specialized in investing in startups. The round also involved Village Global, a fund with investors such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Maya Capital, Clocktower Ventures, Magma Partners, Gilgamesh Ventures, Rally Cap Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, and some angels, such as Sebastian Mejia (founder and president of Rappi) and Karim Atiyeh (founder and chief technology officer of Ramp), also participated in the round.
“Better Tomorrow Ventures realized that Divibank was a truly innovative company, as well as being in the right place at the right time, ready to take advantage of the growth of e-commerce and digital ads. The pandemic has only accelerated things. Many companies are starting online, many are migrating from offline to online, and startups have recognized that venture capital is not their only alternative to grow their business,” says Jake Gibson, founding partner of Better Tomorrow Ventures.
The capital received in the round will enable the company to increase its team from 8 to 30 employees by the end of the year, launch its own digital campaign management platform to help client companies, and also create new financial products. “We realized other pains. E-commerce companies need money to manage their stock. On the other hand, customers who work with the subscription model, could anticipate receiving part of these resources. These are services that we are considering offering,” says Taboada.
The opportunity is huge. Brazil concentrates half of the online media investment in Latin America, and startups and small companies represent over half of Google and Facebook’s revenues in the country. “Our goal is to help entrepreneurs in Latin America by giving them the resources they need to grow their businesses. We have ambitious plans and are looking forward to expanding our product and service offerings,” says Rebecca Fischer.
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