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Latin America’s Movile is quietly building a mobile empire
By 2020, Brazilian mobile giant, Movile, wants to improve the lives of more than one billion people through its apps. The company began its mission in 1998 selling gaming, news and SMS messaging services to mobile operators in Brazil. After receiving its first investment from South African-based global investor Naspers 10 years ago, Movile grew into one of the largest and most successful mobile companies in Latin America, with more than 150 million monthly active users of its apps and estimated revenues over $240 million.
Movile’s app, PlayKids, propelled the company to the global stage. A platform that offers educational products and content for children, PlayKids in 2014 reached more than 6 million downloads within a year of launching, and 5 million active users per month.
From there, Movile turned its attention to an unprecedented strategy of mergers and acquisitions in Latin America. The company’s expansion strategy included investments in more than 20 other mobile companies, such as iFood and Sympla, two of the most prominent players in Latin America’s mobile space today.
Here’s a look at how Movile went from local success story in Brazil to one of the largest mobile companies in Latin America — and its next steps for mobile success worldwide.
The PlayKids launching pad
By 2012, Movile was the largest mobile services company in Brazil. With more than 150 employees, the company established its core offerings in mobile payments, mobile commerce and other B2B mobile solutions. Movile’s teams successfully opened offices in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Venezuela, which they achieved through the acquisition of another mobile company with a similar business model, CycleLogic. But it wasn’t until the launch of PlayKids in 2013 that one of Movile’s creations landed in the hands of millions of users around the world.
By June 2014, PlayKids had users in more than 30 countries and was one of the top-grossing children’s apps of all time. The success of PlayKids allowed Movile to build key relationships with tech firms in Silicon Valley, including Apple and Google, for the distribution of the company’s apps, and Facebook for marketing them.
Also by this time, Movile had more than 700 employees working from 11 offices in six countries, and began the next chapter in their story: ramping up their investments in other mobile companies. Movile used this strategy not only to continue its expansion across the region, but also to fend off any foreign competition eyeing Latin America’s increasingly lucrative mobile market. By 2014-2015, Latin America was the fastest-growing smartphone market in the world with 109.5 million smartphone units sold in the region.
Becoming Latin America’s mobile powerhouse
2014 marked a big year for Movile. The company invested $1.6 million into online food delivery startup iFood in the past, but an additional $2.6 million investment in 2014 led to the purchase of an iFood competitor, Central Delivery. Movile’s investments in iFood and its buy-out of the competition took the iFood app from 25,000 orders per month to more than one million orders per month.
Movile’s goal was simple: take a fast-moving startup and help it grow beyond what the founding team ever thought possible.
The insights and data that Movile gathered during its strategic venture capital investments in iFood were critical. During this time, Movile built the foundation for its investments that followed shortly after, and learned how to make them a success. With each new investment, Movile’s goal was simple: take a fast-moving startup and help it grow beyond what the founding team ever thought possible by infusing cash, human capital and any technical resources or expertise that the startup could possibly need.
Movile quickly solidified its M&A strategy, its processes and its position as a leader in Latin America’s mobile market. To continue financing its growth through acquisitions, Movile raised another $55 million from Innova Capital, Jorge Paulo Lemann and FINEP in its Series D round in 2014. This new round of financing led to even more acquisitions, including the acquisition of Rapiddo, ChefTime and FreshTime. It also allowed the company to make additional investments in LBS Local, the owners of Apontador, MapLink, Cinepapaya and TruckPad.
Bundling an empire
In 2015, after a handful of investments in food-related startups, Movile’s appetite for the food and delivery space continued to grow. Naspers and Innova Capital infused another $40 million (Series E) into Movile in 2016. Movile then boosted its iFood and Just EAT platforms with another $50 million. With access to all of Movile’s resources, iFood quickly rose as a leader in online food delivery in Latin America, with 6.2 million monthly orders and a growing presence in multiple countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.
Movile’s venture capital model became so successful that iFood replicated the same model themselves. iFood took part in more than 10 mergers and acquisitions, including the acquisition of SpoonRocket, a San Francisco-based online food delivery service. iFood acquired SpoonRocket’s technology to help it expand its reach across Latin America.
In 2016, Movile’s Rappido app acquired on-demand courier service 99Motos, and then Movile made investments in Sympla (a DIY-ticketing platform for events), while raising another $40 million (Series F) from Naspers and Innova Capital. By 2017, Movile raised an additional $53 million (Series G) from Naspers and Innova Capital, bringing Naspers’ share of Movile to 70 percent.
On the road to one billion
With no shortage of cash, Movile now has plans to put more than half of its latest $53 million Naspers investment into Rapiddo Marketplace. Movile believes they can transform the Rapiddo Marketplace into a one-stop-shop for a variety of consumer transactions ranging from food delivery and event tickets to refilling mobile credit and hailing rides. Included in this ambitious plan is a payments platform similar to PayPal called Zoop, which handles all digital payments and makes the Rapiddo Marketplace a single platform that can integrate many — if not all — of Movile’s other applications.
If a path does not yet exist, Movile will simply build, acquire or bundle its way to make it happen.
Movile’s mission is no easy feat; however, if the company is to achieve its goal of touching the lives of one billion people through its apps, there may never be a better time. Movile’s all-in-one mobile platform concept is reminiscent of China’s Tencent, which established a number of successful paid services based on its applications. Tencent is currently worth half a trillion dollars and rising, with investments from Naspers and earnings of almost $22 billion last year.
Tencent allows merchants in China to sell their products and receive payments through WeChat, China’s largest mobile messaging app used by more than one billion people. Using an application with widespread adoption and popularity, Tencent is able to continuously add layers and layers of services, precisely what Movile plans to do now with its mobile companies in Latin America.
Movile believes it can be just as successful as Tencent because the Latin American mobile market strikes a number of similarities with Southeast Asian countries. On the other hand, skeptics believe that since Latin America lacks a WeChat-like application to unify the region, it will be difficult to achieve the same level of success. But if we’ve learned anything from Movile, it’s that if a path does not yet exist, Movile will simply build, acquire or bundle its way to make it happen.
Wavy, Movile’s latest endeavor, could achieve this. The business, which bundles Movile’s 400+ content partner companies, 100 million active user base and 40 Latin American mobile carrier businesses, is already one of the largest global players in this space based on sheer numbers alone. The Wavy portfolio incorporates a wide range of products, including educational content and apps, B2B messaging services such as chatbots, SMS, RCS and voice messaging, as well as partnerships with companies in the gaming, bots and apps space.
The race is on among global mobile platform providers and device manufacturers to become the first to offer a total mobile user experience. However, there are very few companies that will ever be able to replicate the range of products and services Movile has developed, making it one of the most remarkable mobile success stories of our time — and one that’s not over yet.
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Brazil’s tech startups begin to expand globally
Startups in Brazil, Latin America’s largest entrepreneurial ecosystem, are no longer solely focused on Brazil as their only frontier to conquer. Based on conversations with founders and in tracking the news, dozens of startups born in Brazil have realized they can compete on a global scale and expand their companies quickly by exporting their business models to other regional markets around the world, including Canada, Colombia, Europe, Japan, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S.
Traditionally, many Brazilian startups have been content to focus on growing their revenues and market share on the “Ilha de Santa Cruz” (Island of the True Cross, as Brazil was named by a Portuguese sea-captain in 1500). There is plenty to feast on here with a growing middle class, the citizens’ voracious appetite for social and digital media consumption and a population of nearly 211,000,000. More so than other major entrepreneurial centers, Brazil’s founders are known for bootstrapping early-stage companies and avoiding global expansion, as the capital can be costly and lead to a dilution in shares in their startups.
Yet, as the country that is home to the world’s eighth largest economy slowly pulls out of a long recession with its first annual uptick in GDP last year, increasingly the “Brazilians are coming” to compete in more international markets — and more rapidly than ever before. Entrepreneurial expansion outside the country is on the rise as the startup ecosystem becomes more mature, and against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of global investment coming into Brazil from China, Japan, Europe, Silicon Valley and beyond. Indeed, international investment in LatAm startups has “more than doubled since 2013.”
Another trend that’s providing more Brazilian companies with the capital needed to fuel their global expansion is the “flurry of equity deals” during the first part of 2018, “ahead of the presidential elections in October that are expected to prompt volatility in the markets,” according to Bloomberg Markets. For example, NYSE’s biggest IPO since Snap earlier this year raised nearly $2.3 billion for Brazilian fintech PagSeguro (NYSE:PAGS), a payment processing company similar in business model to Jack Dorsey’s Square. It was the largest IPO of a Brazilian company since 2011.
Brazil’s export of fast-growth startups is on the rise
There has been a growing stream of Brazilian startups that have begun to shift focus to the U.S. during the last two years. Mosyle, founded in 2012 by Alcyr Araujo, is now based in the U.S. and used in more than 4,000 schools to help ensure that kids’ mobile device experiences are fun, safe and educational with more parental and teacher involvement.
Pipefy, which announced $16 million in Series A funding last month and was originally based in Curitiba, Brazil, has recently relocated its global HQ to San Francisco. More than 8,000 companies in 146 countries around the world use its operations-excellence platform today.
Similarly, PSafe, a mobile security, privacy and performance platform company, moved its global headquarters to San Francisco last August and now has more than half of its revenues from the U.S.
A fast-growth Brazilian startup called Gympass, which offers a corporate benefit plan to keep employees fit and healthy, has quietly grown into a global business in less than six years. Born in the country that places second in overall number of gyms, Gympass lets a company’s employees make unlimited visits to a growing network of multiple gyms and pay less than half the normal monthly fee. Last month, the company announced its launch in 12 key markets in the U.S., adding 3,000 new workout facilities to its global network of 30,000. Its corporate partners include Accenture, Deloitte, Metlife, PayPal and P&G.
The spirit of entrepreneurism in Brazil is as infectious as its natural resources are vast.
Belo Horizonte-based Hotmart, a comprehensive platform to sell digital products like e-books, online courses and software that was founded in 2011, has expanded into Europe, including opening new offices in Madrid, Paris and the Netherlands. It’s also expanded into Colombia.
São Paulo-based Movile, a leader in mobile marketplaces with a big dream of making life better for a billion people through mobile apps, has seen tremendous growth since its founding in 1998. It now employs more than 1,500 people and impacts the lives of more than 100 million people around the globe. Its food-delivery market, iFood, is now booming on all continents, and Naspers and the fund Innova Capital invested a new $82 million round last December, with a singular focus on growing iFood’s market share.
Since its foundation, Movile has raised more than $250 million to accomplish more than 20 mergers, acquisitions and investments in startups beyond iFood, including Maplink, PlayKids, Pointer, Rapiddo, SuperPlayer and Sympla, among others.
Smart strategy and networking resources boost success
With the advent and growth of SaaS platforms, a fast-emerging global on-demand economy and some entirely original business models, many Brazilian startups are poised for success as they scale from being regional plays to any number of international markets. Typically, when more than a quarter of a startup’s business is coming in from international markets — as was the case with Pipefy and its cloud-based platform — the timing is ripe to land and expand outside a company’s home country.
In choosing international markets, a smart strategy for tech startup founders is to analyze those regions that possess high broadband and mobile-device adoption, readily available payment infrastructures, political stability, level socioeconomic playing fields, fair tax requirements and an easy-to-navigate regulatory environment. One useful rule of thumb to help obtain a basic understanding is to compare the overall internet population by country versus GDP per capita. This exercise will generate a model to prioritize countries with larger numbers of prospects with high levels of disposable income.
Another critical element for optimizing success is a solid understanding of regional differences and key variances across international markets — from cultural nuances to regulatory impacts to diverse approaches to conducting business. Identifying and tapping local network resources early on can make a world of difference.
The maturing startup ecosystem in Brazil has benefited hugely from access to Cubo, the largest entrepreneurial hub in Latin America, and its constant intermingling and exchange of ideas between startup founders, investors, academics and government officials.
In Silicon Valley, BayBrazil has been hugely impactful in connecting and building a tight-knit community of Brazilian and U.S. professionals, founders and scholars living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. On a global scale, organizations like Endeavor have sparked high-impact entrepreneurship and success around the planet.
The spirit of entrepreneurism in Brazil is as infectious as its natural resources are vast. A recent rise in startups born and bred in Brazil that are being exported to international markets around the globe to further scale and propagate is a trend to be celebrated.
Saúde! (Cheers)
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