- The competition fosters innovation from startups with a presence in Latin America and the Caribbean;
- Two Mexican and two Brazilian startups feature the finalists’ list.
Lendera and Yaydoo, two Mexican startups, and Datarisk and mGrana, Brazilian ones, have been selected for the semifinal stage of the fourth edition of the Visa Everywhere Initiative (VEI), a competition among startups with a presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. This year, it has sought innovative solutions to boost the economic recovery of small and medium-sized companies and the urban mobility sector in the region.
The startups selected to participate in the next phase of the VEI are:
- Lendera (Mexico): Crowdfunding platform to invest in business projects in exchange for returns. Lendera’s clients are SMEs with leasing needs of machinery and equipment for their business. Investors can buy a good and rent it to an SME for a certain period, so their money generates yields while the SME acquires the assets and becomes more competitive in the market.
- Yaydoo (Mexico): Smart Business Purchasing, Yaydoo helps companies to reduce their business expenses by optimizing each purchase. Yaydoo is creating a suite of products in the intersection of SaaS & FinTech designed to make digital B2B payments a simpler experience in LATAM through :procurement & accounts payable automation, accounts receivable automation, corporate purchasing cards and T&E automation.
- FT Technologies (Costa Rica): “Tap On Phone” solution with Digital Onboarding. FT Technologies’s Klap solution can give access to the payment card industry to a lot of SMEs with a low cost terminal.
- Fygaro (Panama): eCommerce generator & invoicing platform. Fygaro is a “Enterprise Resource Planning like” platform for MSMEs with Invoicing, Accounting and eCommerce features ready to use. It provides ease and automation across the sales funnel at an affordable price for MSMEs.
- Quipu Market (Colombia): Quipu creates digital community markets to supply local products and services without trading money. Quipu’s platform is a digital marketplace for informal micro-businesses where they can buy and sell locally using a community token system instead of money. Their interactions in the marketplace build creditworthiness.
- Riqra (Peru): Comprehensive eCommerce platform for manufacturers and distributors. Riqra’s platform allows companies to manage products, promotions, inventory, warehouses, pricing, logistics, customers, credit lines, and taxes.
- Datarisk (Brazil): “Decision as a Service” platform that allows generating predictive models in an automated way. Their data-science based solutions help companies to easily integrate predictive and machine learning models regarding income and fraud prevention into their day to day business. Although their target clients tend to be large companies, they want to develop a better relationship with smaller businesses who also would benefit from this solution.
- mGrana (Brazil): Instant credit mobile app that rates their users through data generated by their smartphones. mGrana is solving a key issue for microentrepreneurs, many who are not part of the formal economy, that improves their access to loans and gives them an opportunity to grow or improve their business. A main element that differentiates mGrana, is that their solution helps the unbanked, where currently in Brazil nearly 33% of Brazilians do not have access to credit.
- Duemint (Chile): Duemint is solving a key issue shared by most small businesses, liquidity. Currently, their SaaS platform automates the SME collection process, settlements with banks and payment methods. They identified these pain points at the heart of small businesses, and want to focus on these, potentially growing new business lines that stem organically from these solutions, such as installment payment solutions or invoice lending – always keeping liquidity improvement as the main goal.
- Prometeo (Uruguay): The largest platform of banking APIs connecting Latin American Financial Institutions. Although their key clients are large financial players such as banks, Prometeo’s solution allows small businesses to receive streamlined and digital services including payments solutions, improved enterprise financial management, and better loans. Prometeo has the potential to be a key link for Fintechs and financial institutions to improve their own services, ultimately helping small businesses throughout the region.
