Why was Brazil chosen as the stage for the premiere of GoTo's global "tour"?

Americans Rich Veldran and Peter Mahoney, CEO and CCO of GoTo , visited Brazil for the first time in the second half of March, marking the start of a tour by the duo through the main markets of the communication, collaboration, and remote work technology company.

The stay in São Paulo lasted only three days. But this brief visit is directly connected to the status and, above all, the potential of the Brazilian operation on the business map of the American company, present in more than 180 countries and with revenues of approximately US$1 billion.

“Brazil is the fastest-growing market in the entire company,” says Veldran, CEO of GoTo, in an interview with NeoFeed . “And we are here to discover what we can do to further accelerate business in the country.”

With a local team of over 80 professionals, GoTo has approximately one hundred active partners to market its portfolio in Brazil and serves 12,000 clients in the country, primarily small and medium-sized businesses.

Based on this equation, Mahoney provides other figures to reinforce the growing importance of the country for GoTo – the country accounts for, for example, 80% of business in Latin America. "Brazil represents about 15% of our growth," he says. "And we believe that this share could exceed 20%."

With tickets booked for Ireland and Guatemala – some of the next destinations on their “tour” – Veldran and Mahoney reserved all their time in Brazil to personally meet the team, partners, and local clients. As well as experiencing some of the country's culture and delicacies – for example, feijoada.

“We are here to learn, understand, and get to know the local culture and demands that we can meet,” says Veldran. “It’s very easy for a US-based company to have a model that it thinks will work for the whole world. But that’s not how the world works.”

In one of the previous steps in this direction, GoTo, at the request of the local team, integrated its tools in Brazil with WhatsApp, an application that is extremely popular in the country, but not as widely used in the United States.

Another example of this approach is the fact that, in Brazil and Latin America, the company adopts a 100% partner-based sales model, a shortcut to be able to serve the dispersed number of SMEs in the region. And this is precisely one of the focuses of the expansion of the local operation.

With the goal of extending these reach, Brazil is also at the forefront of a new development in this model. In February, GoTo closed a distribution partnership with DirectCall, a Brazilian telecommunications operator that operates throughout the country.

The partnership involves GoTo Connect, the company's flagship platform that centralizes voice, chat, email, messaging, video conferencing, and other communication and customer service tools. It is also GoTo's first agreement with a mobile operator worldwide.

“This is yet another example of what the parent company has done for Brazil based on our demand,” says Vanessa D'Angelo, marketing director for GoTo in Latin America. “With this partnership, we will be able to cover the entire country. And we already have negotiations underway with other operators.”

Still on the subject of partnerships, the idea is to reinforce investments in marketing, which also includes another tour, with roadshows planned in Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, and Salvador. Here, the rationale is also to expand reach, particularly outside the Rio-São Paulo axis.

“We’ve already proven our thesis in these markets,” Veldran states. “And if you can win in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, you can win in the rest of the country.”

In these interactions with partners and clients, another focus is understanding the demands and reinforcing the offering in certain segments, as part of the company's vertical integration strategy – which includes sectors such as vehicle dealerships, clinics and diagnostic centers in healthcare, and retail in general.

At the same time, GoTo is increasingly incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into its portfolio. This includes automating customer service across various channels, as well as features like transcriptions and sentiment analysis of interactions within those channels.

“One of the big recent changes is this democratization of technologies like AI,” says Mahoney. “For the first time, even small businesses can access sophisticated capabilities to create a retail experience like Apple’s.”

Change has also been a recurring theme for the company in recent years. Founded in 2003, the company, previously known as LogMeIn and listed on Nasdaq, went private in 2020 when it was acquired by Francisco Partners and Elliott Management in a deal worth US$4.3 billion.

Two years later, the company was also renamed GoTo, in a move to encompass the changes in its portfolio, especially as a result of the rapid advancement of technologies such as artificial intelligence.

“We needed to adapt to technological changes. What led us to generate over $1 billion in revenue in the first 15 or 20 years wasn't going to be what took us to the next phase,” says Veldran. “So, the real impetus for these changes was the need to reinvent the company.”