A Mexico City fintech is lending to the online sellers banks won't touch - pricing credit on daily revenue and collecting a slice of sales instead of a fixed monthly bill.
Ask a Mexican online seller what actually caps their growth and the answer is rarely traffic or product. It is the next purchase order. The store is selling, the reviews are strong, the next batch of inventory is sitting in a supplier's warehouse - and there is no money to buy it. A bank wants collateral, two years of statements, and a personal guarantee. By the time the paperwork clears, the season is over.
Creizer was built for the gap between "we're selling well" and "we can't afford to sell more." Founded in 2021 in Mexico City and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, it gives online sellers credit priced on one thing banks tend to ignore: their sales. Instead of a fixed monthly payment, repayment moves as a percentage of what the store sells. When sales climb, Creizer gets paid faster. When sales dip, the payment shrinks with them.
The mechanics are deliberately unglamorous. A seller connects the platforms they already sell on - Mercado Libre, Amazon, Shopify, Tiendanube - and Creizer reads the sales data. That history becomes the underwriting. Credit lines run from roughly 30,000 pesos up to several million, and the money goes where growth actually happens: inventory, marketing, logistics, fulfillment. There is no interest rate in the traditional sense and no penalty for paying early; the cost is a fixed markup, collected as a slice of ongoing sales.
A rigid payment punishes a bad month. A percentage-of-sales payment breathes with the business.
That single design choice changes who can safely borrow. A seasonal seller, a brand waiting on a marketing bet, a store that just placed a large inventory order - all of them break under a fixed installment and survive under a flexible one. Creizer's own framing is that some sellers, unblocked by capital, have grown up to seven times in a year.
Where does the money come from? Creizer's answer is part of what makes it interesting. "We bring money from the United States to invest in companies that sell through eCommerce," founder Emiliano Musalem has said. "We provide capital so they can purchase inventory, conduct marketing, handle logistics" - and repay with an additional cost. In plainer terms, it is an arbitrage: capital that is relatively cheap in one market, put to work in another where sellers with real revenue are starved for it.
Musalem is not a first-timer. Before Creizer he was on the team that launched Rappi in Cordoba, Argentina, and co-founded a data analytics tool for small businesses. Both experiences show up in the product - the operator's instinct for what ecommerce sellers actually need, and the conviction that data, not paperwork, is the right way to judge risk.
The typical Creizer customer is a small or mid-size online seller in Mexico with a few months of trading history and a steady monthly turnover, selling on the big marketplaces or their own store. These are businesses with genuine momentum and no bank relationship - too small, too new, or too "unconventional" for a traditional lender's checklist. Reaching them is the whole point. Creizer's underwriting reads the exact signal a bank overlooks: the last few months of sales.
Revenue-based financing is not new. In the U.S. and Europe, players like Clear.co (formerly Clearbanc) and Wayflyer popularized the idea of funding ecommerce inventory against sales. Creizer is frequently described as the Clear.co for LATAM, and the comparison is fair - but the harder work is local. Latin American ecommerce runs on different platforms, different payment rails, and a banking system that leaves most small businesses outside. Regional lenders like Konfio, Kapital and R2, plus marketplace-native credit from the likes of Mercado Credito, are all circling the same customer.
Creizer's wedge is the combination that is hard to copy quickly: a customer banks decline, a data source banks don't read, and a repayment structure banks don't offer. Each of those is a small moat. Together they describe a lending business built for how online stores actually earn.
For a seller, the use is direct: get pre-approved on sales data, take a line sized to the business, spend it on the next inventory run or ad push, and repay from the revenue it helps create - without a fixed bill hanging over a slow month. For anyone building fintech in an emerging market, Creizer is a case study in a repeatable pattern: find real economic activity happening off the banks' radar, build the underwriting for it, and price the risk with a structure that fits the customer's cash flow rather than the lender's convenience.