We are thrilled to announce that MAYA Capital led Avra's Seed round and joined its mission to revolutionize how larger companies interact with SMBs. In Brazil, 99% of companies are either small or medium-sized businesses. Despite their prevalence, these millions of companies remain profoundly underserved, particularly in accessing financial products like credit. Avra is dedicated to changing this by using AI to underwrite better SMBs' credit risk and convert data into business insights.
Avra's co-founders, Viviane Meister & Bruno Alano, learned in the trenches of working in the lending business that traditional credit scores often fail to adequately cover smaller companies, preventing these companies from building a credit history and consequently from accessing financial solutions. Avra wants to break this vicious circle by leveraging cutting-edge machine learning to empower companies to underwrite risk and do business with SMBs properly. To do this, Avra takes a comprehensive approach, building its own foundational models leveraging multiple data sources, including financial behavior, purchase patterns, and other vertical information, for a complete view of the customer.
And they are not stopping there: Avra's bold vision goes beyond transforming conventional credit scoring. They aim to use AI to assist businesses in making informed decisions at every stage of their growth journey, from customer acquisition to retention. Their vision extends beyond financial institutions; Avra wants to start serving non-financial customers, such as CPG and energy companies.
Driving this visionary mission forward are two rockstars at the helm. Avra's co-founder and CEO, Viviane Meister, is synonymous with a high-execution-without-friction. Praised by everyone we talked to as the best person they have worked with, she has extensive experience in the credit space, from credit rating to corporate banking. Before founding Avra, Viviane led the go-to-market efforts at idwall, a prominent identity startup in Brazil.
Joining her is Bruno Alano, a one-of-its-kind technical co-founder and CTO. A developer since he was a kid and thoroughly praised for his ability to solve complex problems in non-obvious ways, Bruno is a second-time founder and was one of the early researchers at OpenAI. Moreover, Bruno also built the early risk assessment algorithms at Isaac, the Brazilian fintech acquired by Arco, and led the AI efforts at JusBrasil before founding Avra.
We are also delighted to once again partner with Andre Street and Eduardo Pontes, co-founders of Stone, who MAYA invited to join Avra's round as angel investors after spotting its potential to redefine data-driven decision-making across all industries in Latin America.
We at MAYA could not be more excited to join Viviane and Bruno in this renaissance in the data industry starting from Brazil. If your company is battling to serve your SMB clients, or if you're a talented professional seeking a chance to reshape an entire industry, join us at Avra.
