Founded in 2016 by Pedro Conrade, Neon Pagamentos is a digital bank that offers credit cards, personal loans, and investment products alongside other banking services to its customers. The company’s goal is simple: unify technology and design to simplify a users’ financial experience. With over 250 employees today, the company serves a customer base of over 9 million accounts across consumer and business platforms.
The leading Brazilian fintech startup announced a successful Series C round of funding on Tuesday. The round was led by leading global growth equity firm, General Atlantic, alongside new participants including Vulcan Capital, PayPal Ventures, Endeavour Catalyst, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. Existing investors such as Monashees, Flourish, and BBVA (through Propel Venture Partners) also participated.
The funding round raised $300 million, which will be split into two $150 million tranches. This comes after a successful $92 million Series B round in November 2019. The new funding will be focused on increasing the hiring efforts for Neon Pagamentos, growing the user base across consumer and business customers, enhancing the platform’s technological capabilities, and investment in product development.
Furthermore, an allocation of this funding will also be funneled into accelerating key growth areas, including new product and feature development for the consumer platform, new financial services for its growing user base of around 1 million micro-entrepreneurs, and amplification of the company’s credit offerings. The latter effort will be crucial to enhancing additional business monetization.
“Brazilian banking penetration is relatively high for Latin America but still lags [behind] developed market peers, with a significant under-banked population that traditional banks have generally overlooked. Neon is focused specifically on providing access to this group and bringing them into the financial world,” said Jean Sigrist, President of Neon Pagamentos. “This new financing enables us to continue our mission of serving even more clients with an increasingly robust offering.”
This is Neon’s third successful round of funding since its inception. The increased need for digital-based services during the world-wide health crisis is credited for the company’s significant growth this year.
