Brazilian digital bank Neon plans to grow its customer base from 600,000 clients to 1 million this year as it raised a new funding round.
The fintech, one of the hottest ventures in the Brazilian startup scene, has announced today (3) that it raised $22 million in Series A funding, with participating investors including Propel Venture Partners, Monashees and Omidyar Network.
According to the bank's chief executive Pedro Conrade, the investment will support goals such as increasing the size of the technology team, currently 40-strong.
"We want to be as agile as possible and not only create new offerings but improve what's already there. In the field we are in, we just can't afford to stop innovating," Conrade told ZDNet.
The technology function at Neon, Conrade says, is multidisciplinary, so employees work in all manner of projects including the digital current account, investment and credit products, as well as business offerings and customer experience.
According to the 26 year old entrepreneur, Neon has not suffered so much from the typical problem that startups - and fintechs specifically - often have around placing technology efforts in one area in detriment of other parts of the business. That, says Conrade, is due to the fact that since its inception in 2016 the bank's various offerings have been developed in parallel - but this was not always the case.
"We currently work in a way where all the offerings are worked on without depending on one another, but at the beginning we focused more on the digital bank account, as it was our first product - but now our products have all entered a continuous evolution phase," Conrade says.
According to Neon's founder, there is a general belief that a digital