In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - HIGHLIGHTS: Fabricio Bloisi - CEO of Prosus

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

We've curated a special 10-minute version of the podcast for those in a hurry.   Here you can listen to the full episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/prosus-ceo-from-startup-to-global-scale-innovation/id1614211565?i=1000769752597&l=nb How do you build a company that reaches 1.5 billion people? Nicolai Tangen sits down with Fabricio Bloisi, CEO of Prosus, to trace an extraordinary journey from humble beginnings to running one of the world's most ambitious tech ecosystems. Prosus is the company behind well-known consumer brands like iFood in Brazil, Swiggy in India, Just Eat across Europe, and PayU powering payments in emerging markets. They discuss Fabricio's "jet ski" model for fast-paced innovation, the bold transformation of Just Eat into an AI-first company, and why he believes AI is still underhyped. Fabricio also shares his deeply entrepreneurial leadership philosophy: hire people better than yourself, empower them radically, and never stop questioning the status quo. With over 40,000 employees and businesses spanning food delivery, fintech, and lifestyle services across Latin America, India, and Europe, Prosus is dreaming at a scale few companies dare to imagine. In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.  The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen, Sebastian Langvik-Hansen and Pål Huuse. Background research was conducted by Isabelle Karlsson. Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday for the long version. Tune on Wednesdays. Hi everyone, I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Soin Wealthun. And today, hey, I'm in really good company with Fabricio Bloisi, the CEO of Process. Now, you may not know what process is, but they basically have incredible companies. Ifood, which is the equivalent of Doodash in Brazil, just eat, which feeds millions and millions of people across Europe. Swiggy in India and Payu one of the biggest fintech

platforms in emerging markets. So all in all, they reach like a billion and a half people across the world. And he's pretty pleased about it himself. I can see his smiling hair on the screen. So far as you, we look forward to hearing all about it. But before we talk about you, what is process? Process is a tech company.

And we offer amazing products for one and a half billion customers on delivery for delivery on top of debt, payment on top of that lifestyle services like events and travel. And we are just getting started. We do all of that in three big regions, Latin America, India and Europe. And I think, and we are reinventing everything we are doing. We are in a moment of amazing change through AI. My whole story is about reinventing everything. So I'm very excited to build the next chapters of pros. What do these companies have in common? I think our focus is to build an ecosystem.

And this ecosystem means we are not investors just to start. What we build are operational tech companies that are very good in execution, technology, services. So when we build an ecosystem, we make sure that one company help each other through cultural management model, cross-sell, innovation, AI. And I'm investing the same kind. I'm building the same kind of ecosystems in Latin America, India, and Europe. So if you look to Latin America, I already had it work in Latin America. In Latin America, people talk about eye food, but it's 10 times bigger than eye foods.

We have beverage and pet shops and payments and meal voucher and grocery and travel. The same ecosystem that is very sophisticated that I have in Latin America, I'm building today in India, where I have very similar companies. And the same ecosystem I'm going to build in Europe. It's start with just eat and OLX, but I'm going to expand that to the same kind of ecosystem. Tell us about some of the innovations you did in the food. company in Brazil. What were some of the clever things you did? Today, for example, iPhone is a company run by AI. The personalization of the first page, what we offer to the customers, the push we give to them, the anti-fraud, all those, the customer relationship management, all of that is through

AI. And there is no guideline how to do that. You have to experiment, to try, to do it better. Today, we spend less money in marketing the our customers. We have better NPS, customers. We have better NPS, customer satisfaction because of AI. We internally, we have a system called Tokan, where we give AI, give the capability to everyone in the business to use AI to do their own jobs better through agents. None of that was done like it was an idea of Fabrice. We go down and do it.

All of that starts with, and power entrepreneurs move fast, test 20, 30 versions, until you have results that makes your company better. Then put that on a scale, because we never invest 10 million, $100,000. million or billion because of idea. What I do is to have entrepreneurs moving fast, we call it jet skis. Tell me about the jet skis. Jetkins means empower a small team with five, ten people to experiment as if they were the owner of that business.

So they have to experiment, take risks, try 10, 20, 13, 13 things, fail a lot until they find on a way that has amazing impact. So all the innovations I told you started as jet keys, a small group trying very fast until we have the best operations of our category or of the world. And why is important to tell this story? Because that's not how big companies work.

Big companies usually, they say, let's make a budget. The budget is a billion dollars to the CEO like this project. Then we have one year to deliver a big big thing. And then one year after you lost a billion dollars and you lost one year. So what we have to find first without money, without team, without

one year timeline, is to find how we make this really work. That is what a jet ski. A small company, a startup inside a big company, with the right people to innovate and deliver. You had to sell your stake in delivery hero, right? Whilst at the same time, competition could make acquisitions.

Just how do you look at the European regulatory environment? Yeah. I am a optimistic CEO founder. but it's frustrating to operate in Europe because at the same time, I have everyone in Europe saying, I need big tech, I need innovation,

I need AI. I said, I'm ready to invest $10 billion to build debt in Europe. And then the regulator said, no, you have to divest. And I even told the regulators, I went to divest and sell to an American

or Chinese company. They said, we don't care. So Europe. So a funny thing, I see the American companies having the government trying to say, I need big tech here, let's make my big tech global leaders.

I see the same thing in India, the same thing in China. In Europe, I have to fight Europe. I have to spend a lot of energy saying Europe. It is good, it's necessary to have big tech here. And what's happening right now in Europe is that Europe is succeeding in avoiding big tech in Europe and succeeding in making the Americans and the Asian big tech to win in Europe because their European companies can't win in Europe. So they

I have I have an obligation to sell my participation in the delivery hero. I absolutely disagree with this direction. Interesting thing two weeks ago, Europe said we are going to change our guidelines

on the MNA. And then we said, okay, so like why we are selling, we are an European company, have two European players, why we are selling one of them. And they said, we are changing next year. You have to sell this year. Let's talk about AI. Do you think AI is underhyped?

I think AI is underhyped. This is a crazy phrase to say. And the reason is I do that operationally. I am a CEO of a big company, but I understand the details about what's happening. Many people last year were talking, maybe there is overhype, and next year things are going to cool down.

It's the opposite. What happened in the last three months? It's much more. than everyone expected for this year. In robotics, obviously, robotics is moving at crazy speed, but what happened with OpenClaw or with cloud code in the last 60 days, it's substantially more than what happened before, and it's going to change completely how companies work.

How is your group going to work going forward by implementing everything you can do in AI? We will have every time more autonomous organizations, where AI do much more than making the job of one person 20 times faster. What AI is going to do is to make the whole company 100, 200% more efficient. Until now, people are trying

to make their job faster. I have to do a document. I say, AI, help me with this document. What is possible today is much more than that, and it was not possible in December. So that's the thing that many people didn't understand. From December to May, now it's possible to

teach an AI to to pitch the intelligence of the company to an AI. So the company can really operate for not for 10 minutes by itself, but can operate for one to three days by itself. Internally, we have 20,000 people creating agents that makes their substantially more productive. The last month, I gave a course to all our executives, start with the CEOs so they can program by themselves.

You can think, are you crazy? We are talking about CEOs of $5, $10 billion company making software? Yes, because when they learn what they can do in four hours work, they understand that all their goals can be substantially bigger. How would you characterize the corporate culture in the company? The first thing I do is to kill the corporate words. Culture means empowering people to move faster, to be innovative. We call our culture process way.

Entrepreneurs that feel that they are in charge to have results. innovation, innovation score to everything. We have to question what we are doing all the time. Obsession about results. We need results. I don't need smart people giving nice excels. I need results and impact. I really believe big companies should have impact

and have a positive contribution to the regions they are. So we talk about culture all the time. I think my job is to set the culture and the vision. And some people love this culture and they work two, three times more. Some people doesn't fit. and we have to politely suggest then keep looking to the company where they fit the culture.

To me, the most important thing, Prostos had a good year, we had good results, we grow, we are more profitable. The financial people like to talk about results and numbers to me. I like to talk about culture because every result we have

is because the company is more focused about giving more power to the right people, moving faster, delivering results and being more innovative.