Movile's next iFood bet is white-label fintech via Zoop, backed by Prosus (interview)

Movile is a Brazil-based mobile-apps group whose portfolio includes iFood, Zoop, Mensajeros Urbanos, Moova, Afterverse and PlayKids.

That any company with customers can become a fintech on white-label rails — Zoop — and that this thesis can grow to iFood's size or bigger.

Movile describes itself as a 'thesis-maker': it picked food delivery a decade ago and built iFood, its flagship. In 2019 it turned to fintech as the next thesis, founding MovilePay to execute it on top of the restaurant base.

In an August 2021 interview with BNamericas, CEO Patrick Hruby laid out where the new R$1 billion (US$186 million) from Prosus — Movile's largest investment since its 1998 creation — would go. Fintech runs through Zoop, a white-label payments and financial-services platform that lets other companies build their own payment solutions; MovilePay proved the model inside restaurants, passing 70,000 active accounts and more than R$200 million in credit granted (self-reported in the interview). The logistics thesis, less than a year old, targets last-mile delivery through Mensajeros Urbanos in Colombia — expanding into Mexico — and Moova in Argentina. Gaming is the explicit 'more of a bet': Afterverse was spun out of PlayKids, which has over 50 million active users, with no finished thesis but an intention to 'invest big'. Hruby said the R$1 billion funds the existing theses rather than new acquisitions, alongside more than 600 open jobs and three straight years of roughly 80% annual growth.

The thesis structure is a portfolio discipline: one flagship cash engine (iFood) funding successive decade-long bets, each with its own company.

Zoop's white-label model recruits every customer-owning business as a distribution channel — the fintech equivalent of iFood's restaurant network.

MovilePay's 70,000 accounts proved the fintech thesis inside Movile's own ecosystem before the group scaled it outward through Zoop.

The logistics and gaming theses show the same pattern at different confidences — one already multinational, one a declared 'bet' with capital attached.

A holding's second act is easiest to fund when the first act is a monopoly: iFood's dominance underwrites theses — fintech rails, last-mile, gaming — each given its own decade to mature.

As of the August 24, 2021 interview, the Prosus money was newly committed to fintech, last-mile logistics and gaming, with Hruby signalling deeper investment in each thesis; the material reports no deployment milestones.