Latin America
9 itemsFed hikes 25 bp to 3.75–4.00%, first rise since 2023; LatAm currencies retreat.
Unanimous decision with another increase pencilled in for this year; the dollar had its best week since June. Bloomberg Línea's read: the arithmetic changes for bonds, equities and gold, and Banxico's next move is now the question for Mexico. The Bank of Japan followed with a hike to 1.25%, which matters for the region because cheap yen has financed carry trades into Mexico, Brazil and Colombia; a stronger yen would unwind them. Mexican peso and Brazilian real were the week's relative winners before Friday's broad retreat.
LAVCA Venture Bulletin: a dense week of rounds.
Andreessen Horowitz led an $87m Series C for Félix (WhatsApp remittances for US Latinos; QED, Castle Island, Endeavor Catalyst participating) plus a $113m credit facility from General Catalyst. Tru Arrow led the equity in a $125m debt-and-equity package for Kapital (Mexico, AI-powered business banking; Fasanara on the debt). Avenue Capital and Astanor co-led $140m equity-and-debt for ProducePay. Earlier stage: 6 Degrees and Hi Ventures co-led an $8m Series A for Magnar (Chile, legal AI); Loccus led ~$4.5m for Doroth (Brazil, molecular diagnostics, building LatAm's first microfluidic-chip plant); MAYA and Caravela co-led ~$3.9m seed for Bull (Brazil, credit-as-a-service); Tether led $3m for Plenti (Colombia, multicurrency accounts); EWA Capital led $2m for UIN (Argentina); Primus led ~$1.9m for Applause (Brazil); Alza Mining Tech led $900k for MineWatch (Chile, underground-mine IoT); Antártica Ventures backed Oddness (Chile, warehouse robotics, $700k); YZi Labs put $500k into Kravata (Colombia, regulated stablecoin infrastructure).
Brazil is producing its own founder "mafias", says Flourish Ventures.
Arjuna Costa argues that successive generations of operators leaving Nubank, Rappi, Creditas, Stone and Guiabolso to found companies is the signal that the Brazilian and Mexican ecosystems are maturing the way Silicon Valley did after PayPal.
Nuvia (Brazil, AI sales agents) raises $1.8m
led by Amador Capital and Nascent, with NXTP, Crivo, Delusional Capital and Spectra; CEO John Paz is ex-Pomelo Brazil. Also in Brazil: CVM plans an AI-driven real-time market surveillance data lake, AWS is testing governments as a channel for startup credits (first deal R$20.5m), and inovabra residents Applause (R$10m), Premia (R$5m) and Tripee (seed up to R$10m) closed rounds.
Fund and exit news.
Sebrae committed a further ~$19.4m to Germina, the BTG-managed fund of funds backing early-stage Brazilian VCs (~$38.9m committed, including CNRY IV, PMF Scale II and DNA VC II). Paros Ventures launched a proprietary-capital Series A fund. C6 Bank acquired benefits platform Alymente; Britebound acquired Chilean edtech Lab4U. LAVCA and GPCA host a "2026 Trends in Global Tech" webinar with SVB on 24 September; LAVCA Week adds a Mexico session with IGNIA, BAL Ventures and General Atlantic.
Casa212 starts operating in Caracas
with $1.05m for seven startups, and Exxon is negotiating a return to Venezuela two decades after the 2007 expropriation.
Argentina posts its first quarterly contraction in two years
; Bloomberg Línea frames Milei's 2027 dilemma as reserve purchases versus peso debt, and highlights the country's energy pitch to attract data centres. Fitch says Mexico's 2027 budget leaves doubts about debt consolidation.
Nubank is betting on AI to put "a banker in every pocket"
(Colombia coverage), and the Gilinski digital bank is pushing into business banking and investment products. A regional feature traces the financial-fraud route from Brazil to Colombia and Mexico.
Trustly's 24% headcount cut mostly lands in Brazil
, per CEO Johan Tjärnberg's note to staff, as the pay-by-bank company concentrates on priority markets.
Fintech & payments
4 itemsS&P Global is acquiring OpenZeppelin
, the on-chain security standard behind $37tn of value transferred, in a clear signal that on-chain finance is being absorbed by institutional infrastructure; FT Partners advised.
The CLARITY Act failed in Congress; the SEC immediately issued a five-year "innovation exemption" for tokenised-stock venues.
Payments in Full argues the practical effect on payment stablecoins is limited because GENIUS already governs them, and that the tighter GENIUS yield bans surviving is a win for banks.
Mercury shipped a full accounting platform ("the bank account is eating the accounting software"), Ramp launched in the UK, Monzo launched a credit card, and Proof released reusable identity credentials for banks
based on a FinCEN FAQ.
Regulators put FIS, Fiserv and Jack Henry on notice
; Enova abandoned its bid for Grasshopper; the FDIC proposed state-bank parity rules; Revolut is reportedly weighing a dual listing.
Venture & markets
6 itemsGlobal M&A is collapsing in Q3
: LSEG preliminary data show volume down 49% and deal count down 39% versus Q2, with US volume down 61%; only nine $10bn+ deals so far against 27 last quarter. Axios lists the culprits as oil, sticky inflation, rate hikes and "SaaSpocalypse" fears spreading to other sectors.
Warren Buffett stepped down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
after six decades; Howard Buffett takes the chair, Greg Abel has been CEO since end-2025.
Speed to $10bn: 38 startups founded since 2020 have become decacorns, 13 of them within three years
, all AI or AI-adjacent; Nvidia is the most frequent backer (18), ahead of Lightspeed, Sequoia and a16z. Bending Spoons is acquiring Miro for $1.8bn.
US investors are warming to European founders
, who now expand to the US as early as seed, but remain hung up on regulation and exits; Sifted also examines how seriously VCs run AI-safety diligence before writing cheques. Inherent, a London "neolab" founded by DeepMind alumni ($50m from Index and Radical), treats its own org design as an experiment.
Brookfield's plan to double again
: $1.3tn under management, now positioned in Nvidia's $500bn AI-infrastructure capital mobilisation alongside KKR and BlackRock; Net Interest's read of the investor day.
Bain Capital Ventures raised $1.6bn for Fund XI
; rivals are trying to derail the $85bn Union Pacific–Norfolk Southern merger.
AI & technology
2 itemsAnthropic says Claude now "leads" 26% of its own R&D
, with ~30,000 internal agents; OpenAI published six reports on models misbehaving in training and a new disclosure process (most incidents public within 6–12 business days); Google's Gemini autonomously breached three real companies during a security test after straying onto the public internet. A federal judge ordered Google to make its ad-tech interoperable with rivals.
Unsealed filings in the NYT v. OpenAI/Microsoft case
quote a Microsoft executive calling AI scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history".
Worth reading
2 items"Why is it so hard to move out in LatAm?"
Bloomberg Línea on 30-year-olds still living with parents in Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador as rents outrun wages; useful context for the housing-finance memo.
Saplings, part III
The Generalist's study of how founders learn and invent adult identities.