The B2B lending startup CashU raised R$120 million for its Credit Rights Investment Fund ( FIDC ), in a transaction that marked the entry of BTG Asset Management and Capitânia Investimentos into the fund’s investor base. Itaú BBA and Credit Saison, which had already participated in the previous R$100 million issuance, also returned to invest in the new round.
The FIDC (Investment Fund in Credit Rights) is the fintech’s main instrument for originating credit for SMEs, with approximately R$ 500 million in annualized credit granted, even before the new investment.
CashU’s competitive advantage lies in its intra-chain credit analysis, a model in which the risk of SMEs is assessed based on their behavior within the B2B chains in which they operate, and not solely on traditional financial data.
In practice, the fintech company grants credit at the time of purchase, using information such as recurrence, volume, product mix, and history of relationships with suppliers to dynamically define limits, terms, and rates with the support of artificial intelligence.
“We were able to grow the portfolio while maintaining very robust performance metrics, which shows that combining intra-chain data with proprietary credit models allows for scaling without sacrificing quality,” says Thiago Saldanha, CEO and co-founder of CashU, in an interview with NeoFeed .
Saldanha, who had already conducted a traditional credit operation, explains that CashU emerged from the search for a model that would provide greater access to credit for SMEs, which was still concentrated in banks . The solution appeared in 2019 when, during an MBA at Columbia University, he met Yuri Fonseca, who would become the co-founder of the company.
With a more academic background, Fonseca brought to the operation the technical knowledge necessary to create CashU’s model for credit origination. Holding PhDs from Columbia and Stanford universities, he is responsible for the company’s Data Science area.
“The whole issue was built on the premise that if we brought machine learning to the data within the supply chain, we could deliver performance 10 times better than the market average,” says Fonseca.
“Our advantage lies in understanding how the behavior of SMEs changes over time and in relation to their peers within the same chain,” he adds.
With the new money, CashU intends to further scale the FIDC’s operations, but Saldanha states that this was never the company’s ultimate goal. “We started by selling credit intelligence, but we quickly understood that we needed to show it working with real money, with harvests and performance.”
The FIDC, says the CEO, was the way he found to “speak the language of the capital markets and the big CFOs”.
“It was necessary to demonstrate, with real money and transparency, that our credit intelligence works in a regulated environment and at scale. The FIDC (Investment Fund in Credit Rights) is an instrument to generate historical data, prove the thesis, and pave the way for larger partnerships, where our credit intelligence can be used in dedicated structures,” says the CEO.
Back to the roots
Transforming large companies into fintech credit providers for their B2B supply chain, which was CashU’s objective when it received its first investment in 2021, never went beyond the business plan. With its FIDC (Investment Fund in Receivables) gaining scale and serving as a showcase for potential partners, the company understands that now is the time to accelerate this business front.
In this context, Fonseca comments, the FIDC, which is now receiving an additional R$ 120 million in investments, was merely the “red carpet” for major players to learn about the product.
“We want to grow much more in proprietary structures that meet the specific needs of each retailer, bank, or large player involved in this intra-chain market.”
In this structure, CashU acts as the operator of the FIDC (Investment Fund in Credit Rights), responsible for credit analysis and decisions, with this large player as the anchor of the operation. CashU also proposes to assume part of the risks of the operations with capital from its investors.
“We can structure the vehicle for this anchor investor and bring in capital from our investors who already invest in our main FIDC. Or even provide our financial expertise to an already structured vehicle,” says Saldanha.
These customized structures are not yet operational and, according to Saldanha, should only begin in the coming months. He states, however, that some partnerships are already under construction.