In a country with over 100 million vehicles, how do you make the vehicle-financing process less bureaucratic and support small and medium-sized used-car dealerships? Gelson Nardino and Gustavo Pulga started tackling the problem in 2018. Two years later, Tecredi emerged as a 100 percent digital vehicle-financing platform. All of the technology was developed internally, including the risk-analysis algorithm to offer credit, and the platform can complete the journey from credit to financing in just ten minutes: a versatile and scalable solution for a growing market. Tecredi can be used for financing vehicle purchases or providing loans with a vehicle as collateral, and it offers white-label versions and APIs to enable companies to work in vehicle-secured credit without developing from scratch. It streamlines credit risk decisions, credit score analysis, and contract generation, enabling security and efficiency. 

Tecredi jumped from nineteen partners at the beginning of 2021 to 810 at the start of 2023, comprising the whole of the South region (with the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná) and some cities in São Paulo. “Brazil is a market with high penetration of early adopters, and Latin America has the highest percentage of Internet banking and smartphone users,” says Gustavo. “There’s a lack of credit solutions in the SaaS market because companies often don’t have the knowledge to make a credit offer safely. And that’s where we come in as a solution.” In the future, they expect an even greater expansion in the SaaS and credit market.

Born in 2020, Tecredi responded to the pandemic as a completely remote company with an innovation mindset that allowed it to hit the ground running. “It accelerated the process with partners because the market needed a digital solution,” says Gustavo. “Our developers met for the first time in March 2023.” With a multidisciplinary team distributed all over Brazil, the founders created a work culture that empowers employees to perform at their best. “The result is a virtuous cycle: when you let people show their work and recognize their efforts, they feel more compelled to make an impact. We’re building this together.” With values like empathy, transparency and gratitude, the employees celebrate their wins and encourage each other. “We have a team of rowers, and everyone is rowing,” says Gustavo. “We don’t have anyone just shouting ‘let’s row, let’s row.’ No, we do it together. That’s the spirit of a startup.”