In a country with the world’s third-largest beauty market but limited startup capital, tech company Beauty for All (B4A) secured $2.5 million to expand its micro-influencer platform connecting beauty brands with thousands of digital creators. The February funding, primarily structured as a media-for-equity deal with 4Equity Media Ventures, arrives amid a surge in influencer marketing in the Brazilian beauty market.

Founded in 2017, B4A began as a search fund and later developed from the merger of two acquired beauty e-commerce companies—a subscription club and a male-focused beauty e-commerce platform. Founder and CEO Jan Riehle is a German entrepreneur who arrived in Brazil 13 years ago, bringing a background in private equity and an MBA from INSEAD. He founded the company following a successful exit from the automotive e-commerce space in 2016.

“We try to bring beauty to everyone, as well as people who can’t afford it. That’s the idea of democratizing it—using technology and AI to make it more available,” explains Jan. The company serves beauty brands, consumers, and digital creators in Brazil, where consumers are highly engaged on social media but often struggle to access premium products at affordable prices.

“Over time, it became like what we call an ecosystem in the beauty space,” Jan says. “We have a lot of activities all around beauty, and they are all highly synergistic.” While B4A still operates B2C e-commerce, subscription services, and direct-to-consumer beauty brands, the company has identified its influencer platform, bfluence, as the cornerstone of its expansion strategy—and the primary focus of its recent fundraising efforts.

bfluence: The High-Growth Influencer Platform

bfluence emerged organically from B4A’s initial affiliate marketing efforts and has since become the company’s fastest-growing business unit. Today, it’s a standalone mobile app with more than 15,000 influencers in Brazil, organized around “communities” dedicated to specific beauty brands.

“We position it as the influencer platform in the beauty space,” says Jan. The platform allows influencers to sell products through personalized shops (earning commissions) or participate in top-of-funnel marketing campaigns with fixed payments. “The whole flow and execution is done through the app,” Jan explains.

This model addresses a key problem for both sides of the creator economy: brands struggle to manage relationships with numerous micro-influencers, while creators need reliable connections to brands and monetization opportunities. Where traditional marketing might focus exclusively on major influencers, bfluence enables engagement with smaller creators at scale.

“What’s still probably not understood is how important micro-influencers are,” Jan notes. “Many brands only look to the big ones and have been doing that for years, but they don’t look at this micro-influencer space because it’s very difficult to operate it on your own.”

With the recent funding, B4A aims to grow bfluence from 15,000 to 25,000 micro-influencers by the end of 2025, while tripling the number of brand communities on the platform. According to Jan, bfluence is projected to grow by 500% this year, albeit from a relatively small base.

Brazil: A Notable Market for Micro-Influencer Growth

The timing of B4A’s fundraising aligns with what Jan identifies as a notable market opportunity created by Brazil’s combination of a large beauty market and limited competition. This situation—where one of the world’s largest beauty markets has relatively few beauty tech startups—stems directly from the capital constraints that B4A has addressed with its funding approach.

“The Brazilian market is pretty dead in our segment. There is almost no competition,” Jan observes. “The market is the third biggest in the world, but there are no startups in this space because there are only a few financing options available for entrepreneurs, due to high interest rates and an underdeveloped Venture Capital ecosystem.”

Beyond the competitive situation, Brazil’s cultural characteristics make it particularly well-suited for influencer marketing. The country’s emphasis on human relationships and social connections translates into high engagement on social media platforms, creating good conditions for bfluence’s growth.

“Brazilian culture evolves a lot around relationships and human interaction,” Jan explains. “It seems to reflect a lot in social media because if you go digital in relationships, then it’s kind of social media. Brazilians are extremely engaged on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. If I look at Europe for influencers, the follower numbers are just way lower.”

Building Community Through ‘Academia de Influência’

Central to B4A’s influencer strategy—and a key focus for the newly secured media resources—is their “Academia de Influência” (Influencer Academy) program. These monthly offline gatherings represent B4A’s approach to developing the micro-influencer ecosystem through in-person community building rather than relying solely on digital connections.

“Every month, we do offline events for influencers, really becoming huge events,” Jan explains. “Last Saturday, we had fun with 150 beauty influencers attending. It was pretty great. Besides that, we have like three times more from all over Brazil watching online.”

The events create a valuable cycle for the bfluence platform, as they increase influencer engagement, foster direct relationships between brands and creators, and provide valuable skill development opportunities for participants. For brands, these gatherings offer a chance to showcase their products and campaigns directly to a targeted group of motivated micro-influencers.

“We invite the brands, and they present the newest communities that have just launched. They allow the girls to be influencers,” Jan says, noting that while the majority of participants are women, the platform is open to all genders.

The media resources secured through the recent funding will specifically help B4A expand these events, both by increasing physical attendance and extending their digital reach.

Growth Strategy for 2025

B4A’s approach to deploying its media-for-equity resources differs from typical venture-backed startups. Instead of raising cash to fund operational losses, B4A has maintained break-even status for the past two years while simultaneously achieving 30-50% annual growth.

“We are not like a traditional startup with a burn,” Jan explains, distinguishing B4A from companies that continuously lose money to fuel growth. “We don’t have a burn. We are operating at break-even, and whatever we have in addition to that break-even just allows us to grow quicker.”

For 2025, the company has opted for a strategy focused on deepening its existing businesses rather than expanding into new ventures. This centers on growing their subscriber base to 180,000 for the B2C operations while simultaneously expanding bfluence, with triple the number of brand communities currently on the platform.

“We’re not starting any new activities, in particular no activities outside the beauty space,” Jan emphasizes. “We’re just doing what we are doing today. We are focusing a lot of resources really on making B-Fluence the number one platform for micro-influencers in the beauty space in Brazil.”

The media resources secured through the recent funding will play a key role in this strategy by enabling B4A to maintain aggressive marketing efforts without diverting funds from other operations.

“For the B2C operation, we are spending about a million reais every month in marketing,” Jan reveals. “If I can replace some of this cash spend with an equity spend, it does free some cash for my cash flow.” As the entrepreneur notes, this freed cash can then be reinvested in platform development, influencer events, and other growth initiatives that cannot be directly substituted with media resources.

Democratizing Beauty Through Technology and AI

As B4A begins to deploy its newly secured media resources, Jan remains firmly focused on the company’s fundamental mission of democratizing beauty through technology and AI.

“With bfluence, we empower women in Brazil to gain money, which then connects them to the beauty sector,” Jan explains. “There is this underlying connection of empowering, democratizing, as we call it in the mission, but very generic through technology because it’s all through our platform.”

Jan envisions the evolution of B4A’s mission as their technological capabilities advance. “It may also be reformulated slightly, as it’s a bit generic today. It goes in the direction of an abundance of beauty, which then connects to topics like making people have more self-esteem, increasing overall happiness,” he reflects.

The development of the micro-influencer economy promises to be transformative for Brazil’s beauty industry over the next few years, creating new pathways for product discovery and purchase. Jan predicts that digital direct selling through micro-influencer networks will become a major part of beauty product sales in Brazil.

“Having that in a digital form—using these networks of micro-influencers—is going to be way more common than it is today,” he concludes. “In five years, I think a substantial part of product sales will come through these channels, driven by this digitalized direct selling. And that’s where we jump in with bfluence.”