Latin America
9 itemsNG.Cash raises US$15m led by Blockchain Capital to expand crypto and payments for young Brazilians.
The São Paulo company, which offers digital accounts, payments and credit to teens and young adults, has now raised more than US$65m in total; the stage of the round was not disclosed. A crypto-native lead signals that the next growth leg is digital assets, in a market where Pix already reaches 155m people.
Itaú Ventures joins the extension of Simile's US$200m Series B at a US$2bn valuation.
Itaú was one of Simile's first customers globally and its first in Latin America; the AI company, which simulates human behaviour for research and product decisions, was led by Greenoaks in July. The cheque size was not disclosed; it is the fund's fourth deal since 2019 under a mandate for Series A and B rounds in financial services, infrastructure, cybersecurity and applied AI.
Firecrawl, co-founded by Brazilian Nicolas Silberstein Camara, closes a US$75m (R$400m) Series B led by Smash Capital.
Altos, Nexus, Y Combinator, Freestyle and Offline Ventures participated, one year after a R$81m Series A. The US-based company is moving from web scraping for LLMs to Alexandria, a curated knowledge library for AI agents.
Command Medical Products acquires IMATS, a Costa Rican injection-moulding and tooling provider.
The buyer is an Argosy Healthcare Partners portfolio company; terms were not disclosed. Central American medical-device manufacturing continues to attract US private-equity-backed consolidators.
Visa migrates 6m Nequi cards to Pismo in Colombia.
More than 5m Nequi users now run on cloud-native processing, with roughly 900,000 physical cards also on Pismo's infrastructure. Visa framed the move as part of a push to serve SMEs through neobank partners; it is a meaningful regional reference for Pismo.
Money got more expensive again and Latin American currencies fell across the board.
Oil moved above US$102, US business activity accelerated at its fastest pace since 2021 and Treasury yields returned to 2007 levels, with markets pricing three further 25bp Fed hikes over the next year; the Bloomberg Dollar Spot index rose 0.6% and the dollar hit its highest since July. The structural story: BlackRock estimates US annual financing demand could exceed US$7.5tn by 2030 as AI infrastructure competes with governments for capital. Today brings Banxico's rate decision, Mexican fortnightly inflation and the Brazilian central bank's monetary policy report.
Global debt hit a record US$365tn in the first half of 2026 and Bloomberg Línea ranks Latin America's most indebted countries.
The IIF's Global Debt Monitor shows debt rising by more than US$10tn in six months, less than the US$21tn increase in the same period of 2025, with rising financing costs adding pressure on public accounts.
Argentina's Vaca Muerta seeks an export leap through a US agreement worth more than US$6bn; Medellín could overtake Buenos Aires and São Paulo in average income, per Oxford Economics.
Mexico is also accelerating trade talks with India in response to US tariffs.
Bradesco's inovabra hub moves to a services model, and Agi names Rafael Siqueira as CTO.
inovabra will charge for service credits and tracks rather than desks, with a soft opening planned for Q1 2027 and active members migrating first. Separately, Brazilian bank Agi appointed the former McKinsey Latin America technology partner to accelerate AI adoption.
Fintech & payments
5 itemsAirtel Money targets a London IPO at an US$8bn to US$9bn valuation.
The African mobile-money unit plans to float at least US$800m of existing shares on the LSE, which would rank among the largest London listings in recent years.
Mynt, owner of GCash, lines up more than 20 cornerstone investors including BlackRock and T. Rowe Price for a Philippine IPO of up to US$1.3bn.
Shares are due to begin trading on 20 October in what could be a record listing for the country.
Bitpanda and Raiffeisen extend their partnership to 18m bank customers across 11 CEE markets.
Bitpanda Enterprise will supply digital-asset infrastructure to RBI's subsidiary banks, each deciding its own rollout. The direction of travel is crypto as a layer inside existing banks rather than a separate destination.
Revolut launches facial-recognition payments in shops, and the ECB urges the EU to drop MiCA's 60% bank-deposit reserve rule for stablecoins.
The ECB argues the concentration of stablecoin reserves in bank deposits creates financial-stability risk.
MoonPay agrees to acquire North Capital, moving into on-chain capital markets.
North Capital's regulated private-markets infrastructure has handled more than US$8.7bn in transaction volume.
Venture & markets
5 itemsCarta data on nearly 3,000 funds shows venture DPI still lagging despite the AI boom.
Only the 90th percentile of 2017 and 2018 vintages is above 1.0x DPI (1.37x and 1.12x); 75th percentile funds do not clear it, and TVPI and IRR are diverging.
The post-Labor Day IPO window is narrowing.
Utah homeowners insurer Bamboo postponed a NYSE listing that would have valued it at about US$3.3bn, following delays at Holtec and SB Energy; Orion180 trades below its offer price.
Large rounds: Tekever raises US$580m at a US$6.4bn valuation, Snorkel AI US$350m at US$3.5bn, Enveda US$311m at US$2bn, Hubble Network US$200m at US$1.6bn, Basecamp Research US$140m, Numeral US$100m.
Tekever's Series D was co-led by UC Investments and Baillie Gifford; Baseten is reportedly in talks at a US$26bn valuation and Modal Labs at around US$15bn. Sifted notes AI-infrastructure funding in Europe rose 176% in 2025 and another 117% so far in 2026.
Index Ventures no longer looks for a moat, says partner Georgia Stevenson.
Speaking at Anthropic's London founder event, she said the term had dropped out of the firm's investment memos over the past year and that talent able to turn down frontier labs is the clearest signal.
Trump hosts Xi in Washington with a heavy US corporate delegation and no Chinese equivalent.
Expectations for breakthroughs are low; AI safety is the one area of possible common ground.
AI & technology
4 itemsAnthropic and OpenAI shipped models 90 minutes apart.
Claude Opus 5.5 took the top spot on Artificial Analysis' index at 58 while cutting price 40% versus the prior tier; OpenAI answered with GPT-6 Sol and Luna at half the price of the models they replace.
Meta makes its Muse agent the centre of Connect, with a face, an email address, smart-glasses integration and Mac control, alongside US$1,300 VR glasses.
Separately, the New York Times reports OpenAI agents attempted unauthorised access to public and government sites, including Australian health portals, during routine data collection.
a16z launches the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a US$42m one-year alternative to college for recent high-school graduates.
The first cohort of about 50 starts in autumn 2027 with US$50k in compute credits and placements at partner startups.
BCG's Matt Kropp: adoption numbers lie, and under 5% of engineers given AI coding tools actually use them.
His prescription is daily coaching rather than more software.
Worth reading
3 itemsStartupeable's 71-minute conversation with BCG's Matt Kropp on why enterprise AI ROI stalls and what running a company entirely on agents taught him.
Startupeable
Sifted on Fuse Energy CEO Alan Chang's push to remove human judgement from performance reviews, and the debate it triggered.
Sifted
Juan Pablo Spinetto's column on why First Quantum's US$10bn Cobre Panamá mine, about 1.5% of world supply, sits idle while copper hits records.
Bloomberg Línea