Goldman Sachs Group Lends $150M to Clara to Meet LatAm Firms’ Need for Loans

Helping to meet Latin American corporations’ need for loans and assistance with spend management, Goldman Sachs Group has lent $150 million to Clara, a Mexican startup that provides lending services to businesses in Mexico, Brazil and Columbia.

With the new financing, the Mexican company — which achieved unicorn status in December — will increase its lending operations, invest in its product and expand geographically, with Peru and Chile being next on its agenda, the company announced Monday (Aug. 8).

In addition, Clara is working to double the number companies it works with — which currently stands at 5,000 — by the end of the year. Clara is the fourth startup in Latin America to which Goldman Sachs Group has extended credit lines recently, with others including Konfio, MercadoLibre and Nubank, per a Bloomberg report.

As in other regions, both the consumer side and the business side in Latin America have seen massive growth in the acceptance of digital payments, Clara CEO and co-founder Gerry Giacomán Colyer told PYMNTS in a December interview.

See also: Latin American Companies Reap Benefits of Digitizing Business Payments

This shift means businesses can use a solution like Clara’s to get real-time visibility over how they are spending, as well as perfect traceability of who spent what and when it was spent, Giacomán Colyer said.

“In the local context, we can also do some really cool things,” he told PYMNTS. “There’s central invoicing in Mexico and in many countries across [Latin America]; what that means for the experience that we’re able to build is we can connect our customer’s account with the tax authority and automatically match any invoice with the corresponding spend on the cloud platform.”

Read more: LatAm’s eCommerce Boom Propels MercadoLibre to 53% Increase in Sales

In one example of the region’s shift to eCommerce, MercadoLibre is seeing record revenues, with the company investing heavily in the region. The company recently borrowed $233 million from Goldman Sachs to expand credit in Brazil and Mexico.

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