Ventures · CEASA Bank

CEASA Bank: what it is and why it matters

CEASA Bank is the financial platform for agribusiness founded by Bairo Gonzalez for those who buy and sell food at Brazil's wholesale food markets.

CEASA Bank is a financial platform for agribusiness, founded by Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, that brings AI-assisted pricing, fast invoicing, means of payment and credit to those who buy and sell food at Brazil's wholesale food markets, operating on the infrastructure of an authorized institution.

The pain behind it

Bairo knows from the inside what it feels like to work and not exist on paper. When he arrived in Brazil, in 2002, and decided to follow his own path, he found himself without documents in hand, far from home and afraid. Years later, broke and with many people depending on him, he learned the second lesson: whoever can't prove what they've done can't get credit to start over.

Those two memories met at the wholesale food markets. There he saw people who feed entire cities and remain invisible to the financial system. The producer who delivers a full load and gets paid in thirty days, on a handshake. The stallholder who moves more in a week than many small businesses move in a month and, even so, has no track record a credit analyst would recognize.

He says he spent six months at home, in front of the computer, building the foundation of the platform. When he went to the banks, he was told no: they refused to integrate the solution. Bairo turned that no into a project. If no one wanted to open the door, he would build the door.

How it works, in plain words

Picture a stall at a wholesale food market at five in the morning. CEASA Bank was designed to fit there, on the phone of the person working it.

A reference price before negotiating. A niche artificial intelligence organizes market data and suggests a price range. The producer or the trader decides.
Invoicing in minutes. The sale becomes an invoice, designed to be issued in under five minutes.
Account, card and card reader. Payment services offered on the infrastructure of an authorized institution, in the model the market calls banking as a service.
Harvest-linked credit and a digital document vault, as next steps.

Every recorded sale becomes a line of history. Over time, the notebook of IOUs turns into a financial portrait that belongs to the person who worked to write it. Underneath it all, the platform speaks the international language of payment messages, the ISO 20022 standard, and connects to BTZ Chain, the ecosystem's record network.

Who it is for

Rural producers, small and medium-sized, who sell at the wholesale markets and need to get paid quickly and prove what they sell.
Stallholders and traders at the markets, who still depend on paper, cash and middlemen.
Agro-industries and buyers, such as supermarkets, restaurants and distributors, who want transparent prices and organized invoicing.
Those who buy and sell across borders, as operations outside Brazil move forward.

The market

Brazil's wholesale food markets are among the country's biggest food counters. In 2025, the 54 Ceasas tracked by Conab, the national food supply company, sold 16.6 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables and moved R$68.7 billion, according to the Prohort program (Conab, July 2026). Volume fell 0.82% from 2024, due to the weather, and value stayed on that scale.

Around them there is an even larger economy. Brazil's agribusiness GDP reached R$3.20 trillion in 2025, 25.13% of the national economy, up 12.2% in the year, according to Cepea-Esalq/USP and CNA (Cepea). Credit is large too: the 2025/2026 Plano Safra, the federal harvest plan, allocated R$516.2 billion to commercial agriculture (Agência Gov). The problem has never been a lack of money in the system. It is the road between that money and the person at the counter.

Worldwide, 79% of adults already have an account, but 1.3 billion still do not, according to the World Bank's Global Findex 2025 (World Bank). The trend is clear: payment is moving to the phone, and whoever is left out falls further and further behind.

Where it stands today

What is on the public record:

The CEASA Bank brand is operated in Brazil by the company with CNPJ 33.809.587/0001-33, which began operating in 2019, and of which Bairo is administrator.
The related company registered in London, CEASA Financial Database Technology Infrastructure and Digital Assets Ltd, was registered at Companies House in March 2026, under number 17075183. Bairo is listed as director and as a person with significant control.
Bairo says an operation in Bolivia is being set up.

What still depends on confirmation is which modules (pricing, invoicing, account, card, card reader, credit and vault) already serve customers and which are being rolled out. Until then, the correct reading is that of a platform being rolled out. "Bank" is part of the brand name: the company does not present itself as a bank authorized by the Central Bank, and accounts and payments fall under the rules of the partner institution.

Why it scales and why it matters

The thesis fits in one sentence: the sales data can be the collateral the small producer never had. Whoever proves what they sell, day after day, no longer depends on whom they know to be served.

Scale comes from geography. There are wholesale food markets in almost every country, and they concentrate many people at a few addresses, which makes reaching each customer cheaper. The same package can serve a market in São Paulo or one in Bolivia, with the technology licensed by the related company in London and each operation answering to its own country's regulator.

And it comes from the ecosystem's design. CEASA Bank is the gateway to the real economy: it is where the concrete transaction happens, before being recorded on BTZ Chain and meeting the other fronts, from health to food. The revenues envisioned for it are classic, such as fees, payment rates and interest on credit, and do not depend on the price of any token.

Why does it matter? Because food is in a hurry. A tomato doesn't wait for the bank to open. Those who feed the country deserve to be served at the pace they work.

This is a vision, and he insists on saying it that way: the platform still has to prove, market by market, that it delivers what it proposes.

Bairo's role

Bairo is the founder of CEASA Bank. He designed the idea and says that, in the six months he spent at home, he built the platform and the artificial intelligence on top of the company that had existed since 2019: his own technology (artificial intelligence, messaging under the ISO 20022 standard, blockchain and tokenization of real-world assets), leaving the regulated part to those authorized to run it. He answers for the company in Brazil as administrator and, in the United Kingdom, as director of a related company registered in London.

For him, the platform answers two refusals at once: the one the producer hears every day and the one he himself heard from the banks. Both, by his yardstick, are the same thing. A no that hasn't become a yes yet.