From the crypto valley to the crypto beach: Argentina’s Lemon disembarks in Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – First, they “cryptonized” San Martín de los Andes, turning the Patagonian town into a crypto-friendly city as its inhabitants started to make massive purchases with cryptocurrencies. Little by little, they spread throughout Argentina and even launched the first crypto Visa card that allows users to pay with bitcoins with the benefit of receiving cashback in cryptocurrencies with each transaction.

Now, Lemon announced its entry into the Brazilian market, the first step of its international expansion, in a story that began just over two years ago.

But why start with such a large market? Brazil is now in the top-3 in the region regarding crypto-assets adoption. The vast majority of crypto solutions in Brazil require a certain technical knowledge to operate, which generated Lemon’s goal to make digital finance something more trivial. Therefore, its primary goal is to provide access to a new digital economy in a simple and secure way.

“This is the first step for our regional expansion. In Brazil, there is a need for a product that brings together the crypto world with the traditional one,” Marcelo Cavazzoli, CEO and co-founder of Lemon, tells Bloomberg Línea. “On the one hand, there are sophisticated crypto companies, where you have to have trading experience to use them, and on the other hand, there are very large fintechs. There is a huge opportunity for an app like Lemon,” he says.

So today, a beta version is being launched for 10,000 users who will be able to use the app and will also receive an NFT. “As the days go by, we will enable more and more services,” says the entrepreneur.

In this first stage, Lemon will offer solutions for the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies with Brazilian Real, under the benefits of Lemon Earn, which include an annual fixed rate of 13% in $DAI and 7% in US$ (among others), and immediate international crypto transfers through $lemontag, according to the startup.

The second stage will include PIX interoperability and then launch its Visa card in the next three months, as they did in Argentina, where they issued 100,000 cards in only three months.

When asked about the strategy in a market much larger than the Argentinean one, Cavazzoli says that “the recipe to expand crypto for ordinary people is to make it cool, in a culture different from Argentina, which has a different mentality. For this, we are hiring 60 people in Brazil to make the company grow”.

The Lemon Wiki has already been enabled in Portuguese, a learning space about crypto, DEFI, Fintech ecosystem, and the new digital economy for potential new users and those interested in learning more about Blockchain.

FRIENDS ARE FRIENDS

The interest in Lemon’s business did not take long to arrive in Argentina, and Tim Draper, Kingsway Capital, Trampoline Venture Partners (Amagis Capital), Coinbase Ventures, Borderless Capital, Reserve, Draper University Ventures, Celo, Grupo Supervielle quickly took notice of them.

Thus, in their last investment round, they reached US$16.3 million. “The trust received from our investors such as Draper Associates, CoinBase Ventures, and the Brazilian company Valor Capital in our last Series A round allowed us to carry out a technological development in record time with a competitive product for the Brazilian market,” explains Borja Martel Seward, CBO and co-founder of Lemon.

At this pace, where there are already 200 people working in Argentina, they do not rule out making new rounds this year and reaching at least one million users in Brazil by the end of 2022.

With information from Bloomberg Línea