The Brazilian startup Digibee closed a $25 million Series A round to accelerate its international expansion, mainly to the United States and, in Latin America, to Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Peru. The round was led by SoftBank Latin America Fund and followed by Kinea Ventures and G2D Investments.
Founded in 2017 by Rodrigo Bernardinelli, Peter Kreslins Junior, and Vitor Sousa, Digibee has developed a solution to connect a company’s different systems – apps, servers, data, cloud, devices, partner ecosystems, among others. According to a study by US consultancy Gartner, systems integration grabs 50% of the budgets allocated to digital projects in companies.
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Bernardinelli explains that the expensive cost comes from the fact that system integration requires a lot of code, which demands good developers – professionals who are increasingly demanding and scarce in the market. Not to mention the specific tools, with strict security controls to handle data.
“We built a platform to make this integration simple and fast, without giving up performance, resilience and security. We built a platform 100% in the cloud based on low code, and also, with cryptography, logs, password vault and others,” says Bernardinelli, CEO of the startup.
Through Digibee’s solution it is possible, for example, to integrate an e-commerce with a financial system; or to integrate the PIX (Brazilian instant payment system) as a payment method in a retail chain; or even integrate the system of a company in the education sector with the system of a large bank to enable the offer of student loans.
All the time, new technologies are emerging in the world, but how to connect them all? Open APIs are one thing, but how do you make them all connect? Our job is to help companies modernize, restructure, and manage their system architectures by improving processes and tools. Our platform generates a lower cost for companies than what a developer would cost them.
Rodrigo Bernardinelli, ceo AT dIGIBEE
Digibee currently serves more than 250 companies from different segments, such as financial, retail, health, IT, telecom, education, among others. Among the startup‘s clients are big names such as Itaú, Assaí Atacadista, B3, Carrefour, Dasa, Fleury, and Bauducco.
In 2021, the company reached BRL 50 million in annual recurring revenue and a growth of 213% compared to 2020. The forecast for 2022 is to grow 230%, exceeding BRL 165 million in revenue.
Now, with Series A, Digibee has a very clear plan: to conquer the U.S. market. “It is the most competitive and represents more than half of the global software market. When we win this market, we will win the world,” said Bernardinelli.
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To make this growth feasible, one of the company’s priorities is to invest in the team, going from 160 employees to more than 400 by December of this year. This includes, besides quadrupling the product area, the hiring of important executives.
The startup has already been bringing important names to the team, like Flavio Pripas, ex-Redpoint eventures and Cubo, as CSO; Ken Arredondo, ex-IBM and CA Technologies, as CRO, and Marcelo Silva, ex-Cisco, who are leading Digibee’s Brazilian operation.
And that’s not all: there is Série B on the radar for soon.
