gate 3 was founded in 2020 as a corporate travel startup, releasing its product just as COVID hit Latin America and “all airports were shut down,” the co-founder recalls. Bianca Pereira.
The timing was “horrible,” she said, but the company didn’t give up.
Pereira and fellow founders Fernando Neri It concluded that the software Portão built could continue to be used to support overall corporate spending.
“We also realized that corporate cards are a great tool.” Pereira, a serial entrepreneur and former Cargill employee, told TechCrunch. “but, Brazilian CFOs hate them. Because at the end of the month all they receive is an untraceable statement. Reconciliation of payments and overall disruption of operations they have to fix. ”
of the gate According to Pereira, the platform combined with corporate cards solves the problem by doing two things.First, it Embed your company’s policy configuration into the platform that approves your transactions.
“We call it a budget. Each one sets where, how much and when employees can spend money,” Pereira explains.
It also connects to a central billing platform. The platform automatically reads and interprets her QR code on a receipt uploaded by an employee, matches the details of that transaction, matches it to check for fraud, and ensures that each item is ordered according to company policy. Confirm that you purchased the .
In 2022 alone, Portão 3 said it facilitated more than $60 million in transactions and issued more than 1 million physical and virtual cards. About 600 companies across Latin America use the technology, including companies such as cryptocurrency companies Bitso and CredPago, health insurance giant Sul América and 123 Milhas. And, impressively, Portão claims he was profitable as of December and continues to grow by 20% monthly.
According to Portão 3, their software has reduced the time spent in the payment management process by 33%. It aims to help companies more easily manage employee spending on travel, fuel, tolls, meals and other outside activities.
The company participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort, but only recently turned to institutional funding to help grow its business, with 3.6 million led by Better Tomorrow Ventures. Completed a USD seed funding round. Endeavor Scale Up, Fincapital, Pareto, Flexport and other angel investors also participated in the funding.
For now, according to Pereira, Portan We are focusing on growth in Brazil, with a view to eventually expanding across Latin America. It plans to use the new capital to hire a product and growth team, and most recently hired a former Samsung director to lead sales. the current, Portão has 30 employees.
Looking ahead, the company wants to focus on new segments of customers in logistics, retail and freight.
Jake Gibson, founding partner of Better Tomorrow Ventures and co-founder of NerdWallet, said for his company: In assessing investment opportunities in Portão 3, we found that Brazilian enterprise companies could access corporate cards, but as Pereira noted, concerns about fraud, reconciliation, and decentralization of data kept the product from moving forward. hardly used.
gate 3‘s software solves problems for large enterprises by providing software that standardizes transaction data, validates card spend to detect fraud, and “dramatically reduces” expense reporting times. He said he was aiming to
“Given that card issuance itself has largely become a commodity, Portão 3 is committed to building a financial management platform that provides CFOs with control and fraud detection,” added Gibson. . “By building technology that integrates with various Brazilian government invoice databases and normalizes and standardizes that data, Portão 3 is able to validate card spend and ensure it does not violate company expense policies. can.”
Better Tomorrow Ventures’ investment in Portão 3 is the latest in a wide range of papers, Gibson notes. The company also lamp United States and Mendel in mexico.
“We are familiar with companies that offer non-card software for businesses, a model that we appreciate and see great value in,” he said.
Portão 3’s pivot is similar to that of US-based Navan (formerly TripActions). Navan also initially focused on corporate travel, but now focuses on general corporate spend management for businesses.
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