Cora
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Ribbit Capital leads $26.7M round for Brazilian fintech Cora
Cora, a São Paulo-based technology-enabled lender to small and-medium-sized businesses, has raised $26.7 million in a Series A round led by Silicon Valley VC firm Ribbit Capital.
Kaszek Ventures, QED Investors and Greenoaks Capital also participated in the financing, which brings the startup’s total raised to $36.7 million since its 2019 inception. Kaszek led Cora’s $10 million seed round (believed at that time to be one of the largest seed investments in LatAm) in December 2019, with Ribbit then following.
Last year, Cora got its license approved from the Central Bank of Brazil, making it a 403 bank. The fintech then launched its product in October 2020 and has since grown to have about 60,000 customers and 110 employees.
Cora offers a variety of solutions, ranging from a digital checking account, Visa debit card and management tools such as an invoice manager and cashflow dashboard. With the checking account, customers have the ability to send and receive money, as well as pay bills, digitally.
This isn’t the first venture for Cora co-founders Igor Senra and Leo Mendes. The pair had worked together before — founding their first online payments company, MOIP, in 2005. That company sold to Germany’s WireCard in 2016 (with a 3 million-strong customer base), and after three years the founders were able to strike out again.
Cora co-founders Leo Mendes and Igor Senra; Image courtesy of Cora
With Cora, the pair’s long-term goal is to “provide everything that a SMB will need in a bank.”
Looking ahead, the pair has the ambitious goal of being “the fastest growing neobank focused on SMBs in the world.” It plans to use the new capital to add new features and improve existing ones; on operations; and launching a portfolio of credit products.
In particular, Cora wants to go even deeper in certain segments, such as B2B professional services such as law and accounting firms, real estate brokerages and education.
Ribbit Capital partner Nikolay Kostov believes that Cora has embarked on “an ambitious mission” to change how small businesses in Brazil are able to access and experience banking.
“While the consumer banking experience has undergone a massive transformation thanks to new digital experiences over the last decade, this is, sadly, still not the case on the small business side,” he said.
For example, Kostov points out, opening a traditional small business bank account in Brazil takes weeks, “reels of paper, and often comes with low limits, poor service and antiquated digital interfaces.”
Meanwhile, the number of new small businesses in the country continues to grow.
“The combination of these factors makes Brazil an especially attractive market for Cora to launch in and disrupt,” Kostov told TechCrunch. “The Cora founding team is uniquely qualified and deeply attuned to the challenges of small businesses in the country, having spent their entire careers building digital products to serve their needs.”
Since Ribbit’s start in 2012, he added, LatAm has been a core focus geography for the firm “given the magnitude of challenges, and opportunities in the region to reinvent financial services and serve customers better.”
Ribbit has invested in 15 companies in the region and continues to look for more to back.
“We fully expect that several fintech companies born in the region will become global champions that serve to inspire other entrepreneurs across the globe,” Kostov said.
Powered by WPeMatico
Brazil’s new fintech startup Cora raised $10 million on the strength of its founding team
It didn’t take much for the founders of Cora, Brazil’s newest startup to tackle some aspect of the broken financial services industry in the country, to raise their first $10 million.
Igor Senra and Leo Mendes had worked together before — founding their first online payments company, MOIP, in 2005. That company sold to WireCard in 2016 and after three years the founders were able to strike out again.
They built their initial business servicing the small and medium-sized businesses that make up roughly two-thirds of the Brazilian economy and represent some trillion dollars’ worth of transactions. But at WireCard, they increasingly were told to approach larger customers that didn’t have the same kind of demand for their services, according to Mendes.
So they built Cora — a technology-enabled lender to the small and medium-sized businesses that they knew so well.
The round was led by Kaszek Ventures, one of Latin America’s largest and most successful investment funds, with participation from Ribbit Capital — one of the most influential early-stage fintech investment firms globally.
“We created Cora to pursue our life purpose, which is to solve the financial problems faced by small and medium businesses. These businesses
The company is currently operating in closed beta and plans to launch its first product, a free SME-only mobile account, in the first half of 2020, according to the statement. Cora will later release a portfolio of payments, credit-related products and financial management tools that are currently being developed.
“So far, large financial institutions have mainly built products that focus either on individuals or on large corporate clients and have totally ignored small and medium sized enterprises, who are the most relevant creators of value in our economies,” said Mendes in a statement. “We want to offer a high-quality, customer-centric suite of financial products that addres
Powered by WPeMatico
Femtech’s billion-dollar year
There are a lot of people who never thought they’d see the day venture capitalists would funnel millions into femtech businesses, direct-to-consumer tampon retailers no less. But that’s our new reality and Cora is proof.
San Francisco-based Cora, which develops and sells organic tampons, pads and other personal care products, has just closed a $7.5 million Series A led by Harbinger Ventures. Cora is one of many femtech startups to raise funding this week alone, in what is turning out to be a red-hot year for VC investment in the space.
Femtech, defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health, has attracted at least $241 million in VC funding so far this year, according to PitchBook. That puts the sector on pace to secure nearly $1 billion in investment by year-end, greatly surpassing last year’s record of $650 million. For more historical context, startups in the space brought in only $62 million in 2012, $225 million in 2014 and $231 million in 2016.
“Investors have realized there is a huge pent-up demand in the market for healthier products for women,” Cora co-founder Molly Hayward tells TechCrunch. “The way in which the VC world is structured, there just has not been a lot of representation. It’s really difficult to understand the value of a product you aren’t ever going to use or to understand a problem you aren’t ever going to have, particularly around period care. This isn’t something we were talking about as a society five years ago.”
The four-year-old startup operates a little differently than your run-of-the-mill D2C company. Like TOMS, the popular footwear brand, Cora donates a month’s supply of products for every month’s supply sold. To date, Cora has donated 5 million pads to girls in India and Kenya and 100,000 products to women in the U.S.
“To me, [Cora] was this incredible, holistic opportunity to change the way that women experience their period,” Hayward said.
Investors must be excited about Cora’s growth. Though she didn’t disclose specific numbers, Hayward says the brand has expanded 400 percent year-over-year, a metric they are expecting to sustain with this new bout of funding. Cora’s products are sold on a subscription basis, with prices ranging from $8 per month for six tampons to $16 per month for 24. For those unfamiliar with the costs of such products, $8 for six tampons comes at quite the premium. A box of 50 Playtex tampons, for example, retails for around $9.
In Cora’s case, customers are shelling out extra cash for millennial-inspired branding, a soothing unboxing experience and a general ease of access to its products, as well as Cora’s organic, hypoallergenic and compostable materials, which aren’t characteristic of many similar products on the market.
Cora plans to use the capital to put more of its items in Target stores, where it already sells its tampons and pads, and expand its portfolio of products. As part of the funding, Cora has added two more women to its board of directors: Lisa Bougie, the former GM of Stitch Fix, and Andrea Freedman, the former chief financial officer of Method. Its board is now 80 percent female.
Powered by WPeMatico
Cora Delivers Organic Cotton Tampons On Demand And In Style
You can’t swing a bag of cats without hitting a new tampon startup. Whether it’s about scheduling deliveries or getting something sweet with the deal, startups are looking to disrupt the age-old feminine care industry with a number of twists and tricks. But Cora, a startup launching today, is looking to re-imagine the entire experience of buying and using tampons, from delivery… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico