Announcing R2's $15M Series A
Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund, led our round
Just 7 months ago, R2 announced its $5.9M seed round led by General Catalyst. Today, we’re excited to announce R2’s $15M Series A led by Wen-Wen Lam of Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. New investors joining this round include Femsa Ventures and PayU, as well as an array of founders and operators building the next generation of platforms in Latin America. We’re also thrilled to have our existing investors — General Catalyst, 166 2nd, and Magma Partners — back us again in this round.
It is a testament to our mission, progress, and team that amidst market turbulence and fundraising uncertainty we were able to achieve this milestone. In Latin America, 87% of credit demand by small businesses is unmet — in tough times like these, capital becomes even more scarce. But technology platforms such as POS systems, payment processors, and marketplaces have accumulated reams of underwriting-rich data, paving a new road to reach these small and medium businesses.
Since launching last year, we’ve carefully crafted a team of 35 professionals spanning 12 nationalities all working arduously on our mission to enable small businesses to have frictionless access to capital through the platforms they use to buy and sell everyday. Together, we’ve built the embedded lending infrastructure that powers technology platforms to seamlessly offer capital to their business users.
R2 is at an inflection point. In the last 12 months, we launched embedded lending partnerships with some of the region’s most iconic technology platforms, financed over 3,000 small businesses, and grew monthly revenue 23x. We’ve grown efficiently through an engineering-driven approach focused on seamless integrations, enabling platforms to quickly provide capital to their business users by leveraging R2’s infrastructure. Our winning approach centers on enabling an end-to-end, white-labeled lending experience that is easily embedded via APIs onto a platform’s product offering. In turn, platforms are able to boost customer retention and activate a new revenue stream when partnering with R2.
We are just getting started — small businesses in Latin America still face a $1.2 trillion credit gap. As more businesses go online and transact digitally across the region, we are well positioned to leverage new data sources to further improve our underwriting capabilities. More importantly, by virtue of already analyzing millions of small businesses and financings thousands of them in such a short period of time, we’ve accelerated our learning process to reach even more SMB customers through the platforms we work with.
As we accumulate more data, we feel particularly fortunate to partner with Gradient in this round. Gradient’s deep expertise in machine learning and AI — which drives our risk management lifecycle — and the institutional resources they bring from Google position us well to continue to provide greater access to capital to previously overlooked but resilient small businesses. We’ve never been more steadfast about our mission and confident in R2’s ability to scale its impact to millions of small and medium businesses across Latin America — and beyond.
With this new round, we plan to expand our capabilities by hiring the best and brightest in Engineering, Product, Data & Risk, Finance, Compliance, Partnerships, and more. If you are excited about building the future of embedded finance and redefining the capital infrastructure for small and medium businesses, we encourage you to come join our team!
