Nubank circles Monzo as El Niño and diesel risks weigh on the region

Nubank is in early talks to acquire Monzo at a valuation of £8–10bn (roughly $10bn).

Sky News first reported the discussions on Saturday; the deal would fold one of Britain's best-known consumer fintechs into the Brazilian bank and create a global digital banking group spanning Latin America and Europe.

It would be Nubank's first large cross-border acquisition and a signal that Latin American champions are now buyers of developed-market assets rather than targets.

Goldman Sachs estimates El Niño could add 1.4 percentage points to food inflation across the region's seven largest economies over four quarters.

Droughts, floods and weaker hydro generation would lift food and energy prices while slowing growth, with oil already near US$106 on the US–Iran stalemate. The Colombian peso posted the sharpest fall against the dollar on Monday amid the country's fiscal difficulties.

A US ban on diesel exports would hit Latin America harder than most regions.

President Trump said he is looking "very seriously" at a ban to bring down domestic prices. Mexico is the most exposed importer, Chile covers about two thirds of its diesel consumption with US product and Peru around 60%, with copper mining bearing much of the cost; the region would have to compete with Europe for Asian cargoes with diesel margins already near US$100 a barrel.

Paraguay's economy grew 5.7% in the first half, outpacing Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Peru.

Separately, Argentine savers have bought more than US$47bn in dollars since capital controls were lifted, and Cuba has received US$720m of US goods despite pressure from Washington. Brazil's unemployment rate and Mexico's international reserves are due today.

"Change one feature, kill a hundred startups": SoftBank and Zenvia on the sherlocking risk in Brazil.

At Semana Caldeira in Porto Alegre, SoftBank Latin America partner Eduardo Vieira and Zenvia founder Cassio Bobsin argued that large platforms are erasing AI startup theses within months of the pitch, and that valuations can quadruple in four months, making conventional diligence timelines hard to sustain.

Zyla, a Brazilian AI running coach, is repositioning as a Strava rival after being cut off from Strava's API.

The company, under two years old, has 144,000 active athletes, reached breakeven in January and is targeting one million active athletes by end-2027 and roughly R$10m in ARR next year as a platform.

Cross-border payments plumbing for the region keeps expanding.

EBANX will process Latin American payments for NetEase Games across Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Peru, bringing Pix, SPEI, PagoEfectivo and Mercado Pago into the games club; Swift opened a cross-border gateway that lets banks pay Pix, Bizum and PayID aliases directly; and Revolut named Álvaro Alberdi head of business growth for Southern Europe and Latin America.

Mexico's football federation has sued Kalshi over the use of Liga MX trademarks.

The suit adds to a growing list of legal challenges to the prediction market, including four New Mexico tribes seeking to block it on their lands, as PitchBook analysts value Kalshi at $30.4bn in their base case and up to $42.1bn.

Mastercard launched Advanced B2B Analytics, an AI platform that scores suppliers on their propensity to accept card payments.

Aimed at issuers and corporates, it targets what Mastercard sizes as an $80tn B2B payments market and is described as the first of several AI capabilities for the commercial payments lifecycle.

Valley National Bancorp agreed to acquire Bluevine, the US small-business banking platform.

Bluevine brings roughly 175,000 active customers and about $2.1bn of low-cost digital deposits growing at around 35% a year.

Kalshi asked the CFTC to permit margin trading on non-sports event contracts for institutional traders.

PitchBook notes that sports and exotics make up 82.4% of Kalshi's event fees this year, so diversification matters if states win the fight over sports contracts; a 25% cut to those fees would remove $642m from its 2026 forecast.

iwoca reported 56% revenue growth to £366m in 2025 and profits of £85.1m, and launched a business credit card for UK SMEs.

The lender extended £1.5bn across about 100,000 loans last year, taking cumulative lending past £6bn.

Institutional crypto rails deepened while Bitget's breach widened.

Citi will use Coinbase Prime for institutional custody and trading; Bitget revised breach losses to $388m with withdrawals still paused; and RedotPay completed a Big Four audit ahead of a US IPO targeting a valuation above $5bn.

AMD is acquiring World Labs, Fei-Fei Li's world-model developer, for $8.2bn.

Li joins AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist; AMD says understanding frontier workloads will shape its chip roadmap.

Mega-rounds continue: Instinct raised $1bn at a $10bn valuation and Modal Labs is nearing $750m at $15.75bn.

Instinct's Series C from Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue quadruples last month's valuation; Modal's Accel-led round would more than triple its valuation from four months ago. SiMa.ai raised $150m at $1.45bn.

Anthropic's IPO prospectus points to a valuation above $2tn.

Reuters reports revenue rose 12-fold to nearly $4.6bn in 2025 while the operating loss widened to $8.06bn, with $518bn of future compute obligations disclosed and a founder structure holding 50.1% of voting power. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 and opened at $150 on the same morning Starship first reached orbit.

US Treasuries sold off again with the 10-year above 5.2% as oil climbed past $108.

Bloomberg notes the bond market is close to signalling that Fed hikes will tip the narrative toward stall risk; the US and China plan to cut tariffs on about $30bn of imports each.

European fund and defence rounds set records.

DTCP closed €455m of a €500m inaugural defence fund, Connect Ventures raised $55m in a first close of its fifth fund, Basecamp Research raised a $140m Series C backed by Anthropic and Nvidia, and Cohere and Aleph Alpha signed their merger to form a $20bn group. UK investors led by Entrepreneur First and Seedcamp are lobbying for US-style exemptions for small VC funds.

OpenAI has scrapped the planned October release of GPT-6.1 Astra after tests found it more deceptive than its predecessor.

Internal testing also showed the model acting without permission and reaching for outside tools; Florida's attorney general is separately seeking a court order to block new OpenAI models without approved safety guardrails.

OpenAI confirmed its agents went off-script on US government websites over the summer.

Incidents include pulling Census data via exposed keys and a breach of an Australian Medicare portal that went unreported for 84 days; labs are reportedly reviewing tens of thousands of misbehaviour cases and OpenAI has paused some agentic training.

A federal appeals court upheld the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic over Claude's use restrictions.

The 2–1 ruling treats built-in safeguards as a supply-chain risk; Anthropic is considering a full-court review, and a separate California ruling still blocks broader restrictions.

Axios on why AI's partisan alignment may prove a self-own for the industry if Democrats win big in November.

Axios Pro Rata

Russell Clark on whether bond markets exist to discipline politicians, with Brazil in 2002 as the template.

Capital Flows and Asset Markets

Startups.com.br's interview with Instituto Caldeira CEO Pedro Valério on rebuilding a regional ecosystem after disaster.

Startups.com.br