The B2B financing and payment platform Tribal Credit has raised $40 million in a debt round, which included $20 million USDC from the Stellar Development Foundation.
As CoinDesk reported Thursday (Jan. 6), the remainder of the funding came from an additional $20 million from venture debt funding firm Partners for Growth.
Chief Strategy Officer Mohamed Elkasstawi told CoinDesk the addition of USDC into the company’s ecosystem will give small-and-medium-sized businesses that are its clients “cheaper, easier and faster access to capital.”
This funding follows a $34.3 million Series A – which also included participation from Partners for Growth – Tribal wrapped in April of last year.
Read more: FinTech Tribal Credit Notches $34.3 Million Series A For Expansion In Mexico
Elkasstawi said SMBs in emerging markets have a tougher time getting access to capital, often hampered with interest rates between 20 and 200% per year. Crypto, meanwhile, gives these businesses “much easier to capital,” Elkasstawi said, and rates between 10% and 50%.
He added that while stablecoins are growing rapidly, they’re still primarily used in the crypto world instead of traditional finance.
“One of the great use cases of blockchain is cheaper access to capital. In order to reach that use case, we are building the infrastructure to connect the crypto industry with traditional finance,” he said.
Tribal says it plans to launch crypto-related products this year, but did not provide details.
Tribal’s platform lets companies make payments to employees, merchants and/or suppliers, either online or in store.
Read more: FinTechs Offer LATAM SMBs Speedy Access to Credit in Emerging Markets
In December, the company announced plans to expand into Chile, Columbia and Peru, with designs on moving into other Latin American countries this year. Tribal has said that SMBs in that part of the world often struggle to access credit and payment rails because of a tightly regulated and tightly controlled market.
“So, what we want to do in these Latin American markets is to open up access to credit,” Arvind Nimbalker, global head of product at Tribal Credit, said in an interview with PYMNTS.
“We have a proprietary algorithm which helps us underwrite these companies and give them access to credit, and using that credit, they can use the Tribal platform to make payments to virtually and literally anybody in the world.”
