Web startups in Brazil
The internet has changed the way the world works and is bringing new ideas to the fore. It is also bringing new places to prominence, and one of those new places is Brazil .
Long regarded as a tropical land of samba and football, Brazil is shaking off the lazy old stereotypes and is starting to take its place in the contemporary world.
With the World Cup coming to Brazil in 2014 and the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro two years later, these are exciting times for the country and there is a real sense of optimism. Whilst most countries are currently struggling to keep their economies afloat, 2009 was a very good year for the Brazilian economy, and 2010 is proving just as good. Last year The Economist declared Brazil’s arrival as a player on the world stage, and it would seem that it is here to stay.
As the country finally begins to fulfil its huge potential, this is being reflected in the online world as Brazil begins to create a lot of home grown web startups. The conditions are perfect: there is capital, there is a huge domestic user base, there are ideas and there is enthusiasm. A good example of online user uptake can be seen by looking at stats regarding Twitter users by country. In June 2009, 2% of all Twitter users came from Brazil. By January 2010, that figure had jumped massively to almost 9%, to make Brazil the second biggest user of Twitter after the US.
One of the most important elements in place is that capital available to entrepreneurs but also, for the first time in Brazil, there is a mature environment for startups, with online resources such as Startupi connecting the people with ideas to the people with money. Much of the optimism in the online world is fuelled by the massive success of Buscapé, a comparison shopping engine founded in Sao Paolo in 1999 and sold last year to Naspers for a massive $347 million.
Some of the country’s brightest web developers are returning to Brazil to set up projects after learning their trade in Silicon Valley. One such web entrepreneur is Julio Vasconcellos. After many years in the tech industry in the US, Vaconcellos moved back to Brazil in March 2010 and founded Peixe Urbano (which means “urban fish” in Portuguese). The site is a collective buying and deals site which is getting lots of publicity from sites at home and abroad.
Aside from Peixe Urbano, there are plenty of other interesting startups in Brazil worth keeping an eye on, such as Boo Box, Predicta and SambaTech. Another sign of the growing web business in Brazil can be seen by the upcoming W3C
conference being held in October 2010 in Belo Horizonte.
With many computer science graduates each year, an already established creative industry, availability of local capital and an influx of new ideas from around the world, the future of the web in Brazil looks good.