Nubank and Revolut escalate their Colombia bets as data-centre IPOs wobble

Nubank pledges $1.58bn of investment in Colombia by 2030.

CEO David Vélez said the bank now has five million Colombian customers and more than $3.49bn in local deposits, making Colombia its clearest third market after Brazil and Mexico.

The commitment arrives the same week Revolut received its Colombian banking licence, setting up a direct contest for the country's underbanked mass market.

Revolut passes one million customers in Mexico and maps a 2027 Colombian opening.

The UK neobank hit the Mexican milestone less than eight months after launching full banking operations, having invested $167m locally, and says Mexico is the platform for its Americas expansion. In Colombia it has committed COP 400bn (about $125m) over five years, plans 1,000 ATMs and will lead with cards and remittances.

Colombian and Mexican SME banking gets two new products.

Lulo Bank launched Lulo Empresas, a fully digital business banking suite that has already onboarded 194 companies and moved more than COP 500bn through enterprise accounts this year. In Mexico, Klar Empresarial extended its 360 platform to PFAEs and RESICOs, targeting the 10–12 million registered independent taxpayers who have lacked tailored business accounts.

Magalu's aiqfome joins the Brazilian delivery antitrust fight.

The Magalu-owned app, strongest in interior cities, filed a complaint at Cade arguing that the regulator's 2023 settlement with iFood left many municipalities outside the exclusivity restrictions and disadvantages rivals. It lands the same month Magalu Delivery launched in more than 400 cities, widening a dispute already running between iFood, Keeta and 99Food.

Brazil's crypto sector resets under Banco Central rules from 31 October.

Mercado Bitcoin's Europe CEO Reinaldo Rabelo told the Digital Assets Conference the transition opens a new phase of dialogue rather than an end for the industry. The central bank's Nagel Paulino set out three priorities for the next twelve months: a stablecoin framework, a Banking-as-a-Service structure for virtual assets, and staking, which the primary regulation left out.

Binance launches a 24/7 USD/BRL perpetual with 100x leverage.

The USDT-settled contract trades through weekends and holidays using external feeds during market hours and order-book pricing when FX venues are closed, a sign of how offshore crypto venues are building around the real's onshore trading window.

Citi says the region is now in "Super El Niño" territory.

Equatorial Pacific warming reached extreme levels in September and, according to analyst Johanna Chua, crossed the threshold of the most intense episodes. The risk runs into early 2027 through droughts in some zones and floods in others, with knock-on effects for harvests, reservoirs, electricity, food prices and regional inflation.

Regional markets caught the risk-on tone while copper approached a record.

Most Latin American currencies gained against the dollar, copper rose to $14,661 a tonne in London on tighter Chinese supply, and Argentina's farm sector is closing in on Brazil as the world's second-largest corn exporter. The Fed's unanimous quarter-point hike to 3.75–4% under chair Kevin Warsh is the backdrop; Brazil's Copom minutes and Mexican retail sales are due today.

Trump's Venezuela oil deal hinges on ageing, costly fields.

The agreement with Alejandro Betancourt covers 17 fields and gives the US majority control of a large share of the country's output, with North American Blue Energy Partners aiming to add roughly 300,000 barrels a day within about two years. Industry analysts call the target difficult given remote fields yielding heavy crude, while the deal faces sovereignty blowback in Caracas.

US regulators open doors to crypto-native banks and retail IPO access.

Bastion received conditional OCC approval to operate as a national trust bank offering crypto custody under federal oversight, while Coinbase began offering IPO allocations to US retail traders starting with Oura.

Compliance and B2B fintech rounds: Footprint $25m, FintechOS £21m, Benford $5.7m.

Footprint's Series B, led by QED Investors, funds its Percy AI system for financial crime. FintechOS raised £21m after reaching profitability, with US revenue up 130%. Benford, founded by Palantir and Goldman alumni to run statutory audits with software, raised a pre-seed led by firstminute capital with Global Founders Capital.

Polymarket's regulated US exchange has overtaken its offshore book.

The US venue traded $3.92bn in the first eighteen days of September against $2.93bn offshore, with daily volume up 76% on August; 99.4% of it is sport. The Ninth Circuit ruled Kalshi's sports contracts are Class III gaming on tribal land, pushing event-contract venues toward state-level licensing.

Data-centre IPO enthusiasm is cracking.

SB Energy delayed its listing amid resistance to a valuation above $50bn, Holtec paused its offering indefinitely and Aggreko slowed its plans as investors question growth assumptions and execution risk.

Nscale files for a roughly $2bn IPO with a $1.02bn first-half loss.

The London neocloud reported $140.6m of H1 revenue and $103bn of contracted value, 85% of it from Microsoft and Anthropic, with the $44.6bn Anthropic contract still lacking committed financing. It last raised at a $13.5bn post-money valuation.

Oura launches its IPO at $40–44 a share, seeking up to $2.2bn.

Existing holders account for nearly two-thirds of the 50 million shares on offer, with Forerunner Ventures selling its entire 9.3% stake; the midpoint implies a $13.48bn market cap.

a16z wants more European deals but no European office.

General partner Anish Acharya said the firm is "very actively" looking at Europe and wants founders to pursue opportunities that only make sense for European consumers, after closing its London outpost less than two years after opening it.

European deep-tech mega-rounds cluster: Euclyd €200m, Open Cosmos €300m, Exein $270m.

Euclyd's Series A was co-led by the EU's Scaleup Europe Fund and Samsung; the same EU fund is in talks to join a $500m-plus ElevenLabs round, and DeepMind's Jack Parker-Holder is reportedly nearing $700m for a new London lab, Emulate.

State attorneys general and the DOJ fight over who polices mergers.

Antitrust chief Stanley Woodward accused state AGs of "overenforcement", days before Paramount settled with 12 states to clear its $81bn Warner Bros. Discovery deal, conceding $1.5bn in additional US production spend and a 30-film annual theatrical commitment.

Three researchers used Claude to breach OpenAI's private codebase in under 72 hours.

Hacktron AI chained an image-upload bug and a token flaw to take over employee accounts, collected a $6,500 bounty and said the same software flaws let it reach Slack, Meta and GitHub Enterprise. Google separately confirmed Gemini breached three firms in a similar test.

Meta's Muse becomes the top free iPhone app and reignites the chip trade.

The agent logged 730,000 US downloads in about five days, outpacing ChatGPT's post-launch window, and helped push AMD up 10% to a record and near a $1tn valuation.

Anthropic opens a physical biology lab for Claude-directed experiments.

The Bay Area facility will have Claude steer lab robots with limited human intervention; the company says drug discovery is not its purpose and it is avoiding human trials to keep clear of pharma clients.

Sifted's interview with a16z's Anish Acharya

on why the best European companies are "unapologetically European" and what that means for a US fund's deal flow.

Bloomberg Línea's Carlos Rodríguez on the Super El Niño

, mapping the second-order effects on Latin American power, food and inflation into 2027.

Predicted's Q2 2026 State of Prediction Markets report

, 70 pages of charts on a sector that traded $111bn in the quarter, more than 2024 and 2025 combined.