Flash, a startup that has created a flexible benefits platform for Brazilian companies and employees, has raised $22 million to spend on the B round of the series led by Tiger Global Management, Monashiis (who led Flash Series A), Global Founders Capital (who supported Flash Seed Scholarships), Citius and Kaufman Fellows.
Founded in 2019 by childhood friends Ricardo Salam, Gilharm Lane, and Pedro Lane, Flash can recreate what it sees as an old way of offering benefits to workers in South America’s largest country. The São Paulo-based company has created a flexible benefits management application by providing a MasterCard to replace historically delivered food in the form of “outdated, merchandise and compulsory” food and transport “vouchers”.
“Our first product was a renewal of the voucher that was a mandatory benefit given to all companies as part of compensation by Brazilian labor law,” Salem said. “There are four umbrella initiatives owned by banks, which were 95% of the market with old products and fat margins and exploited everywhere.” Beyond that, Flash has taken its proposal one step further by providing the company with a way to configure its benefits so that employees can “choose and manage the benefits of their choice” through Flash’s app marketplace and cards, Salem noted. The agency is certainly doing something right.
Since its inception, Flash has grown its customer base to 4,000 companies, ranging from start-ups to SMEs to enterprises. Last year, Flash increased “10 xs” through all metrics. Using its platform it went from 10,000 employees to 100,000. So far, this year the number has already stood at 250,000. The company declined to release hard-earned earnings figures but said Lane’s customer growth was reflected in the company’s GMV. Flash has also grown from about 50 to 200 employees in the last 8 months.
At the beginning of the epidemic, when companies were sending employees home and trying to help them pay their bills for electricity and utilities, there was no way to help them, Salam said. “So we created one in our app that enjoyed our wallet and was able to read the utility provider’s bar or QR code.” “It turned out to be a very popular benefit.”
