Brazilian stock exchange B3 and Neoway launch startups program

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Neoway, a Brazilian company that offers big data analytics and artificial intelligence for businesses, and local stock exchange market B3 are launching Smart, a relationship program with startups. The program’s goals are to find companies that can help Neoway expand its product offering.

According to Guilherme Mendonça, Neoways’ vice-president of strategic partnerships, two batches will be selected every year. The companies will receive mentoring, access to clients, and Google Cloud credits, in addition to access to Neoway’s tools and the offices in São Paulo and Florianópolis.

As a plus, the partnership can strengthen the possibility of an investment or acquisition by Neoway, B3, or its corporate venture capital fund, L4 Venture Builder. “For a CVC, the best model is to do business with someone close to you,” says Pedro Meduna, L4’s co-founder. According to him, the idea is to make at least one investment in a company that participates in the first two batches of the program.

Created by partnerships

Smart was created based on a partnership project that Neoway has been operating for two or three years. Even though it was not so structured, the initiative generated good results. Four products were created with startups such as Botmaker, Agrotools, and Combat Fraud (CAF). “With CAF alone, we have already generated tens of millions in sales. We almost doubled the company’s revenue”, says Mendonça. According to him, after B3 acquired Neoway, many of these agreements were also expanded to their umbrella, increasing the scope of the offers.  

With the new innitiative, which is part of Neoway‘s broader partenership strategy, the plan is to have three to five companies in each edition. “Since this is the first edition, we don’t know what is the exact number. But we don’t want to select many companies so we can be close to each one”, says Mendonça.