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Over a year after grabbing $4 million in pre-seed funding, Chile-based Kredito, a business lending startup, is back with another $6 million in new funding.
The company launched to the public in 2021 and partners with financial institutions to help small businesses with their spend management, access digital unsecured loans, open a bank account and obtain a business credit card.
When we profiled Kredito last year, Sebastian Robles, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that business credit didn’t automatically come with an account, leaving business owners to use personal credit cards.
“Everyone wants to sell online, so e-commerce capabilities are key,” he told TechCrunch recently. “Most of our customers are moving online, but what’s happened is that banks are more restricted with their products, making it harder for the unbanked or the underbanked to access decent financial services or sometimes even a bank account.”
Instead, Kredito takes on that risk by using a proprietary algorithm and alternative data to evaluate credit risk more inclusively than traditional banks, and in real time, Robles said. It also created products with few requirements so that it could reduce the cost of acquisition and gather data from customers on how best to help them access financial products. For example, the account and corporate card can be used by anyone, while the loan product is accessible to those who qualify and share data with Kredito, Robles said.
Including the new equity funding round — Robles is still finalizing a debt round — the company has raised $11.5 million in equity and debt so far. The new capital came from a group of angel investors and family offices, including Cornershop by Uber founders, Oskar Hjertonsson and Daniel Undurraga, and various partners from real estate developer Patio.
Robles wasn’t necessarily planning to go after new capital this soon, but said Kredito was growing faster than expected. He has run the company very lean, but needed to add to the small team to meet growth.
The company has about 100,000 accounts and approximately 5,000 active users and is seeing 90% revenue growth month over month, he said. It is focused on maintaining that growth throughout the next year as it continues to open thousands of new accounts each month.
Robles intends to use the new capital to expand into new countries and consolidate its growth in Chile. Exporting Kredito’s product — making sure what it does in Chile it can do in other countries — will be key, he said. As such, the company will work first on its underwriting by accessing data in multiple countries and replicating its strategies.
“Internationalization is the main focus,” he added. “We have a lot of work to do. We have made a lot of progress in the underwriting and the loans, and now we have to do the same with other products. Locally, we will focus on growth. We already have product market fit and a lot of traction, and now we want to grow more.”
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