Tribal Credit

Tribal offers expense management and short-term financing solutions, mainly targeted at startup businesses. The company uses a proprietary AI-driven underwriting approval process to assess users’ creditworthiness (in place of personal guarantees and credit history). Tribal offers physical and virtual business expense cards (powered by Visa; launched in December 2019), which can be used for domestic and cross-border payments. Users can set custom spend limits to control expenses, and the cards also provide expense categorization and real-time insights to help businesses optimize their spending. Tribal generates revenue from interchange fees whenever the cards are used for payments and does not charge users for issuing cards.

Moreover, in response to pandemic-led demand for business payout management solutions, the company launched “Tribal Pay.” This lets enterprises make local and global payments - primarily ad and subscription spend - in over 180 countries (as of February 2022). It also provides embedded financing solutions through credit lines of up to 120 days, for which it charges fees based on the credit line utilization.

Key customers and partnerships

Although the company is based in the US, it has a strong Latin American focus with Mexico being its largest market (as of February 2022). Tribal’s payment volumes handled in Latin America reportedly grew by 90x in 2021. Its customers span 22 countries and include several startups including Minu, Ben and Frank, and Fairplay.

Tribal is also a member of Visa’s “FinTech Fast Track” program, which was designed to help FinTechs better integrate with Visa to deliver payment solutions.

Funding and financials

Tribal raised USD 60 million in Series B funding in February 2022, led by SoftBank Latin America Fund to invest in expanding its reach in Latin America by recruiting in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile.