Konfio and Facebook launch new joint initiative to help SMEs

konfio and facebook launch new joint initiative to help smes
konfio and facebook launch new joint initiative to help smes

Contxto – Time for another interesting partnership. A couple of months ago, Facebook partnered up with Platzi in order to grant 1,000 scholarships to aspiring developers. Now, it’s back again. Along with Konfío, it’ll seek to help out founders’ and SMEs’ financial health.

The Purple Room

Konfío is a Mexican startup that offers online working capital credits for SMEs and freelancers. Its platform leverages data analytics and machine learning to make lending processes faster, more reliable and more efficient.

Aula Morada, as it will be called, aims to boost more than 8,000 businesses through informative and practical events. This will run across 16 different Mexican cities.

The startup is powering this program in partnership with Facebook. Both companies will offer conferences and workshops to train founders and businessmen.

With the hopes of consolidating business models, some of the content will include online sales, talent attraction and retention, funding, technology and marketing. 

As expected, the first edition will be held in Mexico City on the 27th of September.  

Another initiative, “Impulsa Facebook” will be launched simultaneously, for attendees to learn how to properly use Facebook tools in order to maximize reach and conversion. Good offline strategy, Facebook.

According to David Arana, Konfío’s founder and CEO, the initiative wants aspiring business-people to learn the challenges that more mature companies have gone through. With that in mind, they’ll be able to develop the skills and use the tools in order to better manage their business.

“We want to create a community where entrepreneurs can acquire new skills and create strategic relationships that allow them to lead to success in their ventures,” said Arana.

We are excited to launch this initiative, with a company like Facebook, with whom we share the objective of promoting small and medium enterprises in Mexico.

Xóchitl Balzola-Widmann, Facebook’s country manager for Mexico, believes that digital tools are crucial for the growth of companies nowadays.

“We are committed to the development of digital skills in people, especially in entrepreneurs, since we believe they have the potential to help local businesses grow,” mentioned the executive.

“We are happy to collaborate with a key ally of SMEs in the country, such as Konfío, to help this segment so important for the economy.”

Helping out SMEs

Despite the economic impact and importance of SMEs, they are increasingly having more trouble growing and even surviving. In fact, 75 percent of Mexican SME’s die within the first two years of launching. Even worse, startups are more flammable.

“According to our Credit and Growth Report, access to financing and lack of long-term value creation are the main obstacles to the growth of SMEs in our country,” said Konfio’s founder.

“The agenda of each event will be different according to the specific needs of the entrepreneurs in each region, but always aimed at supporting financial inclusion through strategic and intelligent use of technology.”

Aula Morada will initially launch in Mexico City’s Papalote Museo del Niño. In the upcoming months, new events in different cities will be announced. In order to know the calendar of events visits this link!

-VC

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