The Brazilian digital platform economy: a first approach

The digital platform economy has grown in the past decade and has caught the attention of policy-makers and scholars. There is evidence in the literature that this new configuration of economic activities has implications for the sovereignty of data produced within a national frontier, market concentration, competition patterns, and data privacy. Despite this relevance, empirical knowledge about the landscape of digital platforms and their main features is still scant. In general, a few cases of digital platforms draw public and scholarly attention. The lack of empirical knowledge about what constitutes, in fact, the platform economy is worrying, mainly due to the regulatory advances that have been proposed in the world and followed by Brazil. In this study, our goal is to provide a descriptive overview of the digital platform economy in Brazil by assessing aggregate characteristics of digital platform companies founded in the country, such as geographic distribution, sector and source of financing. Using Crunchbase data, we found 556 digital platform firms, demonstrating that the Brazilian national private sector followed the global trend of developing digital platforms. The gross majority of them are small companies concentrated in the “commerce and shopping” sector and centralized in the South and Southeast regions, whose epicentre is São Paulo metropolitan area.