Today we're launching R2 in Brazil, Latin America's largest economy. We're doing it with the support of Ant International, a global fintech company with expertise in payments and embedded finance, and we'll announce our first Brazilian partner soon.
Here's a few reasons why this matters.
Digital platforms in Brazil – marketplaces, payment processors, ecommerce solutions, POS systems – sit on top of a financial goldmine: direct relationships with thousands of merchants, and a real-time view of how those businesses operate.
What they don't have is a way to turn that into credit, the fuel that small businesses need to grow. Building a lending operation from scratch takes years of building, significant capital at risk, and a regulatory burden that most platforms have little interest in absorbing. So the opportunity often sits on the table.
R2 changes that equation. A platform can now offer working capital to its small business users, under its own brand, without taking credit risk and without building anything from scratch. The infrastructure already exists and currently runs across four Latin American markets. Integrations with R2 take weeks, not years.
For SMBs, the change is simple but transformational. Capital shows up inside the tools they already use, when they need it most.
Traditional lenders want to underwrite formal tax returns and audited financial statements. Most small businesses in Latin America don't have them, so the engines of economic growth become invisible to banks. But a small business that sells consistently through a marketplace, manages deliveries through a logistics platform, or processes payments through a POS terminal is already generating critical signals to underwrite it. The data exists.
R2 makes it actionable.
As of Q2 2026, R2 provides capital to more than 27k small businesses every month across Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Peru. Origination volume grew 2.5x year-over-year in July. Up to 70% of eligible applicants are pre-approved, and funding lands in under an hour on average across all of our markets.
Two things make Brazil the obvious next market for R2.
First, Pix. Last year, Pix processed 79.8 billion transactions and is now the primary payment method in the country. An enormous share of SMB activity now runs on digital rails – which means an enormous share of SMB activity is now legible to underwriting using transactional data. Exactly what our AI-based risk models are trained on.
Second, the enormous credit gap. Millions of Brazilian businesses generate consistent revenue but still can't access traditional financing. Alternative lending in Brazil is growing 14.3% a year and is expected to reach $3.4 billion by 2029. That growth isn't from creating new demand; rather, it's revealing the demand that was always there.
Across LatAm, platforms have become the operating environment for small businesses. Merchants sell through marketplaces, manage day-to-day logistics online, and get paid digitally. Commerce moved into software.
Finance is following the same path in LatAm. Instead of asking a small business owner or micro entrepreneur to leave the platform he runs his business on and apply for a loan somewhere else, embedded lending puts capital inside the product that already understands his business. Transactional data replaces tedious and redundant paperwork. Automated underwriting with AI replaces application wait times. Capital arrives when the business needs it most, not weeks later – if at all.
We think this is one of the biggest opportunities in Latin American financial services, and we've spent 6+ years building for it.
Expanding into a market the size of Brazil takes more than technology. It takes capacity and operational depth to serve platforms at greater scale.
That's what our strategic partnership with Ant International, announced in 2025, enables. Ant International handles over 20+ million transactions a day and helps more than 150 million merchants reach over 2 billion user accounts globally, across payments, embedded credit, treasury, and AI-powered financial products. In Brazil, they already provide embedded financing and credit technology through partnerships with ecommerce platforms and local fintechs.
We share the same mission and ambition of getting financing to the small businesses who deserve it and need it to grow.
Brazil is the beginning of a new chapter of greater ambition and impact for R2. We'll keep working with digital platforms across the region to put credit directly inside their products, so more small businesses can capture the upside of the digital economy.
We can't wait to start scaling here.
