Samuel Carvalho's Praso is profitable with 100 staff, serving 10,000+ Brazilian restaurants in a $50B wholesale market

Samuel Carvalho dropped out of Stanford and returned to his hometown of Recife, in Northeast Brazil, to build Praso — a tech-enabled wholesale commerce platform connecting manufacturers with small and medium-sized businesses. Four years in, the company is profitable, has a team of 100, and serves more than 10,000 restaurants across two cities that together represent just 4% of Brazilian GDP.

The market

Praso started with food and beverage because it's the highest-frequency procurement category. Restaurant wholesale alone is a $50B annual market in Brazil; expand to the rest of Latin America and that figure doubles to roughly $100B. Add other verticals beyond restaurants and the addressable market multiplies by five or six times again. The comp Carvalho reaches for is iFood, the largest food delivery player in Brazil, which is controlled by Prosus and carries a $10B+ market cap. Praso operates B2B rather than consumer, and Carvalho believes the wholesale opportunity is larger.

“We serve a little bit over 10,000 restaurants in just Northeast of Brazil so far. Only restaurants, if you look at restaurant procurement, is an over $50,000,000,000 a year market. The company overall is already profitable. About 40% of our customer acquisition is sales led, 60% comes through organic or merchant referrals.”

Why disintermediation isn't a real threat

Manufacturers can't economically serve small restaurants directly. The order sizes are too small for them to handle logistics, and they lack the tools to assess credit risk at that scale. Praso handles both — logistics and short-term credit — which makes it sticky. As Praso captures more of a merchant's procurement spend, it moves up the payment priority stack, which Carvalho says drives delinquency rates down over time.

Credit model

Praso offers short-term loans only, with an average tenor of around 10 days, turning the book roughly three times a month. The design is deliberate: small merchants are volatile, so long-dated credit doesn't make sense. The short cycle keeps the outstanding balance manageable while compounding returns quickly. Praso already uses a financing partner for underwriting and doesn't expect to need large capital raises to scale the credit book.

Customer acquisition

60% of merchant acquisition comes through organic channels and referrals; the remaining 40% is sales-led. Keeping customer acquisition costs low is structurally important because small businesses carry high natural attrition — if the product doesn't work, churn erodes growth faster than sales can replace it.

Growth runway

The two cities Praso currently operates in represent only 4% of Brazilian GDP, implying a roughly 25x expansion opportunity within Brazil before touching other LatAm markets. An eventual US IPO is the stated ambition, and most of Praso's existing investors are US-based.

On the Brazilian macro, Carvalho is candid: conditions aren't good, but Brazil looks relatively better than other emerging markets, which is driving some capital inflows. He points to renewable energy — over 70% of Brazil's energy mix — and significant rare earth reserves as structural long-term advantages.