By Staff Writer
Naspers, Africa’s biggest tech firm, announced late on Thursday that it has invested $30 million (R393 million) in Movile, a mobile marketplaces based in Brazil.
The tech firm said the funds will be used to fuel growth in food delivery, tickets and education apps as well as in Rapiddo, an Online-to-Offline (O2O) platform recently launched in Latin America that consolidates several popular consumer services in one convenient place.
Innova Capital, a private equity fund focused on high-growth innovative companies in Latin America and the US, also invested $23 million in Movile.
Some of Innova Capital’s largest current investments have at its core a strong mobile technology component, such as Movile, Snapchat, Sigga, Accera and Trade Force.
“Movile is in a strong position to use this new investment to realize our dream of impacting one billion people through our products and services,” said Fabricio Bloisi, CEO of Movile.
“Naspers and Innova Capital have been great long-term partners, and we look forward to continue working with them.”
Currently, Movile’s ecosystem has approximately 100 million monthly active users. The company has been acquiring and building leading mobile businesses in LatAm for more than a decade including iFood (food delivery marketplace), PlayKids (kids content marketplace), Rapiddo Delivery (cloud delivery marketplace), Maplink (cloud-based routing for deliveries), Sympla (tickets marketplace) and Superplayer (music marketplace).
Movile will leverage its expertise, footprint, and the new funding to enable and accelerate growth across all of its businesses including building Rapiddo to combine heavily used O2O services into one place.
Mobile commerce is an important driver of new growth for businesses. Platforms like Tencent/WeChat in China and Line in Japan are reaping huge benefits from integrating products and services on a mobile-first O2O platform, starting the customer interaction on their devices and receiving products and services in real life.
