Sensedia specializes in developing APIs for system integration. The resources came from the American fund Riverwood Capital
The startup Sensedia, born in Campinas (SP), announces this Tuesday (11) an investment of R$ 120 million that will be dedicated mainly to its international expansion. The resources came from the American fund Riverwood Capital, which has already invested in Brazilian startups such as 99, Vtex and Resultados Digitais.
Sensedia specializes in the development of APIs (Application Programming Interface), connections between different company systems, a service that has seen an increase in demand with the push towards digitalization brought about by the pandemic.
APIs allow the integration of systems and services developed by different companies. With them, it is possible, for example, to take maps from a tool that helps the driver choose the route into a racing app or place a tool to request credit through a bank's system in a financial control app.
The company was founded by Kleber Bacili, a computer engineer graduated from Unicamp (State University of Campinas), and its vice-president of growth and co-founder is Marcilio Oliveira, who has a master's degree from the same institution.
Sensedia has offices in Brazil, Peru, Colombia and the United Kingdom. The goal now is to have facilities in the United States from the second half of the year. The startup started the year with 400 employees and expects to end 2021 with 700, more than 50 of them outside Brazil.
It is the first time that the startup, created in 2007, has raised funds from investors. According to Kleber Bacili, president of Sensedia, the business is already profitable, but the new resources will allow for stronger acceleration.
Bacili states that in the last two years demand for the company's platform has increased by 160%.
According to him, in addition to the search for companies to expand digital services during the pandemic, the advancement of Open Banking, a Central Bank platform that will allow customers to decide with which financial institutions they will share their data, boosts its market.
The businessman states that there has also been a deepening of the use of cloud technologies and a greater fragmentation of the distribution of company services on these remote servers. This architecture allows for more specific attention to the development of each service and increases the need for APIs to bridge the gap between them.
This division of companies' infrastructure into microservices does not usually appear to the end consumer, says Bacili. But it becomes evident when just one of a company's many services stops working properly. Previously, when a bank's system went offline, everything it offered became unavailable. Now, it is possible that just reading the balance has a problem, explains the businessman.
Sensedia has around 140 clients, including companies such as Natura, SulAmérica, Cielo and Banco Original. Bacili says that growth in 2020 was mainly due to the increase in the volume of services offered to each of them.
Reproduction of original matter published on the Folha de São Paulo newspaper website, on 11/5/2021.
