Owner of an intelligence platform that provides credit analysis for companies that lend to small and medium businesses (SMBs), the startup CashU tapped a 6.1 million Seed round led by ABSeed and followed by funds such as Caravela, ScaleXOpen, and Bertha Capital, in addition to angel investors. The funds will be used to improve the proprietary technology and to expand its customer base.
Founded in 2019 by Thiago Saldanha, Yuri Fonseca, and João Torquato, CashU’s core business is intelligence. The startup serves B2B companies that already offer credit to other companies or plan to add some credit product to the shelf. CashU’s value proposal is to ensure more autonomy and assertiveness to its clients in the credit granting process and, on the other end, to positively impact thousands of SMBs that struggle to access credit in traditional offering models.
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“Our client is the B2B company, but we realize that we also impact the SMBs indirectly because our client’s interests are the same of them. One of our customers, a marketplace, saw its recurrence increase 300% when it added the credit offer for its customers. Recurrence directly impacts the marketplace business,” Saldanha explains.
CashU’s technology is based on machine learning and connects with the management systems of large B2B companies – startups, marketplaces, among others – to access the transaction and payment history of their SMB clients in real-time. This data generates metrics that, combined, result in a score three times more accurate than other solutions available in the market, according to the startup. With such information, companies have more security to grant loans to SMB customers.
“Companies, in general, have few tools to support the decision making. They resort to incomplete information and unreliable financial reports. The consequence is many lost deals, while small companies that would be good debt-paying are unable to move forward in their journey,” says Saldanha.
Besides, Saldanha explains, the intelligence generated by the platform also helps companies to better understand their SMB customer base and improve their credit offering, including developing new products such as Buy Now, Pay Later solutions, Full Protection, or long-term working capital lines to finance SMB growth.
If our client was not offering credit, we are able to help him understand which clients he is going to start this credit offer journey with. Our process is a risk-reducing process. We turn data into decisions.
Thiago Saldanha, CEO at CashU
CashU does not disclose the numbers of its operations or how many clients it already has, but according to Saldanha the startup currently serves enterprise clients, private equity investees, and startups, and projects to end 2021 with an average monthly growth of 20%.
For Felipe Coelho, partner at ABSeed, CashU’s business model is in line with a trend of “fintechization” of companies from different sectors, which are exploring the vertical of tailor-made financial services for their customers.
“But for this, it is required to go beyond intelligence and management. Each business keeps its own specificities and consequently has very particular opportunities. What Cashu delivers is precisely the understanding of this scenario through its technology and methodology, resulting in faster and more precise answers”, said the investor.
