- DinDin scaled up fast and raised BRL 600,000 through the online venture capital platform EqSeed, in 2018;
- Dindin’s CEO is part of the 3% of women who run organizations in Brazil.
Bradesco has just announced it has acquired the Brazilian fintech DinDin through Bitz, Bradesco’s digital wallet and payment account. DinDin is a digital payments wallet founded in 2016 and is now the first case of return to EqSeed investors.
Since it was founded by the Brazilian entrepreneurs Stéphanie Fleury and Juliana Furtado, DinDin scaled up fast and raised BRL 600,000 through the online venture capital platform EqSeed, in 2018. In the following year, the fintech was a finalist for the Visa Everywhere Initiative: Women’s Global Edition. The CEO and co-founder Stéphanie Fleury is the first woman to sell a startup to Bradesco. She stated that “one of the things that most motivated us about Bradesco’s proposal was the confidence they showed in our team.” She will now take over as Head of Bitz’s Commercial Area.
READ ALSO: Brazilian bank Bradesco launches Bitz and enters e-wallet market
The expertise accumulated in these four years of operation, and the startup mindset will help to build Bitz with more agility and focus on innovation
Stéphanie Fleury, ceo and co-founder of dindin
“Dindin accelerates the acquisition of know-how and brings in an experienced team, which is crucial for Bitz’s expansion plan,” says Curt Zimmermann, Bitz’s CEO. The business is in line with the growth strategy of Bradesco’s new company. “We want to win a slice between 20% and 25% of the digital portfolio market within three years. We may make another acquisition later this year, with the aim of accelerating the team’s structuring and growing the business,” he says.
READ ALSO: The rise of digital wallets in Brazil
Dindin’s CEO is part of the 3% of women who run organizations in Brazil, according to a study by Bain & Company, carried out in partnership with Linkedln in 2019. “I am extremely honored to have the opportunity to occupy such an important position in a company the size of the Bradesco Group. We need to do our part and allow more women to achieve leadership spaces, in favor of a more diverse and more successful”, she said.
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At the beginning of the operation, it was DinDin’s own partners who financed the company’s growth in the early years. However, after reaching a certain level of traction in the market, the startup raised additional investment from 46 individual angel investors through another Brazilian fintech, EqSeed, that promotes venture capital crowdfunding. Thus, the acquisition of DinDin not only benefited the companies directly involved, but also brought returns for investors who believed in the company’s potential there in 2018.
“When raised by the EqSeed platform, DinDin already presented an extremely innovative, robust and efficient solution, which we believed had the potential to fill a relevant gap in the market. At the time, they broke a record in cash with BRL 600,000 in just 12 days. This efficiency coupled with high scalability evidently accelerates the process of leaving a company, as happened in the case of DinDin, being acquired only two years after its investment round. Investors in our platform saw this potential in the company in 2018, and will now be rewarded with a significant return on their investment in just two years”, said EqSeed’s founding partner, Brian Begnoche.
The deals still depends on the approval of the Brazilian Central Bank. The transaction amount has not been disclosed.
