Why We Invested In Dinie: Introducing Dinie, an Embedded Finance Platform for MSMEs in Brazil
Brazil’s 17 million micro-, small- and medium-sized businesses (MSMEs) face a significant credit gap. This is largely due to banks’ inability to effectively serve these customers with the short-term working capital products they need in a cost-effective way, resulting in intensive applications, cumbersome approval processes and high interest rates. As a result, MSMEs often remain sub-scale and are unable to invest in growing their businesses. As the country begins to recover from the pandemic, the small businesses that are an essential part of local community life will need to be in a position to respond to the increase in demand, and capital availability will be an important part of the response.
Enter Dinie (pronounced "genie"). When I first spoke with co-founder Suzy Ferreira, she shared her firsthand experience with this challenge. Growing up in a family of entrepreneurs, she witnessed exploitative interest charges that caused family members to go bankrupt. At at only eight years old, she decided one day she would fix the broken system and empower small businesses.
Today Suzy, alongside co-founders Andrea Burattini and Vinícius Cibim, is doing just that. Dinie is providing the essential infrastructure that allow digital platform providers such as dLocal to become fintech lenders, building an end-to-end embedded lending platform that partners can access through a simple API connection. Dinie leverages data from partner platforms to quickly approve and underwrite credit, monitor cash flow and repayment behaviors, adjust credit lines, and approve new drawdowns without additional paperwork. This type of embedded finance enabler is becoming a more important part of the overall financial services ecosystem and Dinie is a pioneer in Latin America.
All of this would have been impossible just a few years ago. However, with the open API infrastructure of today, increased mobile/digital adoption and a fast-growing fintech ecosystem, Brazil’s financial services landscape has evolved significantly and creates a ripe opportunity for Dinie. This is why our team -- along with Accion Venture Lab, K50 Ventures, Domo Invest and Tribe Capital -- are investing in the company. With next wave of fintech products such as Dinie Credit Account (business overdraft) and DiniePay (a buy-now-pay-later offering), we believe Dinie will help increase the financial prosperity for its MSMEs customers and positively impact the health of the Brazilian economy. Join Flourish in celebrating Dinie’s latest financing round (see news) and the growing fair finance ecosystem in Brazil!