Latin America
9 itemsNubank is in early talks to acquire Monzo at a valuation of £8–10bn.
Sky News first reported the discussions on Saturday; Monzo is also weighing a fresh raise above £8bn to fund a push into continental Europe rather than a sale. Nu's shares only partially recovered after their steepest fall since 2025. It would be the largest cross-border move by a Latin American fintech to date, and UK commentators are already framing it as another lost London listing.
The 30-year US Treasury yield climbed past 5.61%, a level last seen in 2002.
Inflation, high energy prices, fiscal worries and heavy corporate issuance to fund AI capex are all pressing on long bonds, and Fed officials left further hikes on the table. That raises the global floor for regional borrowing costs just as the Colombian peso steadies ahead of today's Banco de la República decision and Chile reports retail and industrial data.
Colombia is seeking IMF support to correct its fiscal crisis.
The Fund said the country must take measures to reduce its fiscal imbalances, and Bogotá is now exploring what form a credit line would take. With today's unemployment print and rate decision, this is the item to watch for Colombian exposure.
Brazil votes on Sunday, and the startup agenda is almost absent from the candidates' plans.
Startups.com.br reviewed the programmes filed with the TSE by the six leading candidates: none mentions the Marco Legal das Startups, Inova Simples, crowdfunding or tech listings, and the word "startup" does not appear at all in Lula's plan. Bloomberg Línea separately asked what the result could mean for Argentine assets.
Cognition, maker of the Devin coding agent, has opened an office in Brazil.
Its valuation went from $25bn before its May round to $48bn after September's; the local office signals that US AI labs see Brazil as a sales and talent market worth a presence.
Torre's Alexander Torrenegra says AI is reshaping which Latin American profiles get hired remotely.
The platform now runs more than 5,000 AI-conducted interviews a day and made over 28,000 matches between companies and remote candidates last month. AI screening is lowering the cost of hiring Latin American talent for global employers.
Guanabara Holding, the Barata family's bus group, has created a technology arm.
It already sells three software products to the Brazilian road-transport sector and is betting on digitalisation to fend off new entrants. Separately, insurtech Bys hired the former CTO of iFood Pago, André Martins, to simplify the systems it runs for partner companies.
Viva Bolivia, the Nuevatel-operated mobile carrier, has a live deployment of Iris stablecoin infrastructure.
Discussed on this week's episode with Agora's Nick van Eck and Tala's Shivani Siroya, it is cited as the example of telco distribution carrying dollar stablecoins to under-banked consumers, with Tala's credit engine as the purchasing-power layer wallets lack.
Banxico's governor says Mexico can set its rate path independently of the Fed.
With US long yields at multi-decade highs and the Fed signalling restraint, the comment matters for the peso carry trade and for Mexican credit funds pricing 2027 paper.
Fintech & payments
4 itemsCheckout.com crossed $750m in annualised net revenue, up 28% year on year.
It expects about $150m of adjusted EBITDA in 2026 and $480bn of processed volume, and is directing the surplus into business accounts, payouts, issuing, its platforms business and agentic-payment tooling.
Meta's Muse agent has bank leadership teams asking whether an "agentic bank run" is coming.
Simon Taylor argues the deposit-flight risk is overstated but that the real threat is losing the customer's next financial decision; McKinsey estimates that moving 5–10% of current-account balances to best rates could cut industry deposit profits by 20% or more. Andrew Dresner is more sceptical: Muse uses virtual cards rather than network tokens, absorbs liability for agentic purchases, and will eventually charge a transaction fee.
Revolut customers were hit by a fresh security incident via the broker it uses for US stock trading.
The company is meanwhile preparing to launch facial-recognition payments at UK checkout terminals. Lisbon-based AI agent risk startup Humanos raised a $3.2m seed led by Anthemis.
Agentic and instant rails advanced on several fronts.
Shopify opened its full checkout flow, including Shop Pay, to browser-based AI agents; Citi became the first bank to offer multi-market instant payments on the Swift scheme; Coinbase received CFTC approval for a regulated clearing entity; and at Sibos, Oracle integrated with Swift's ledger to connect tokenised-deposit systems across banks. Blockchain.com is reportedly targeting a $500m IPO later this year.
Venture & markets
5 itemsInstinct raised a $1bn Series C at a $10bn valuation, four times its price of 33 days ago.
Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue backed the personal-agent startup, which has yet to disclose any user metrics. PitchBook data cited alongside show late-stage AI startups carrying a median valuation of $4.7bn versus $1.3bn for non-AI peers.
A heavy day of US mega-rounds.
EliseAI raised $350m at a $4bn valuation co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer; General Intuition raised $220m at $6.2bn, up from $2.3bn in June; Ortet raised $500m from Thoreau; and Helix Digital Infrastructure took a $1bn investment from Samsung, bringing its capital to over $11bn. OpenAI's annualised revenue is approaching $70bn and it is reportedly seeking a $30bn-plus round at a $1.4tn pre-money valuation.
Oura postponed its Nasdaq IPO eight days after launching an offering of up to $2.2bn, citing market uncertainty.
StrictlyVC, Bloomberg
New funds: Protego Ventures closed a $125m debut defence-tech fund, deliberately below its $150m target; Dorm Room Fund raised $50m.
In the UK, Sifted mapped the VCs that could run the government's £1bn Scale-Up Fund, and founders of ElevenLabs, Fractile, Ineffable and Recursive called for limits on non-competes.
Goldman Sachs' board has discussed handing John Waldron the CEO role as early as next year,
with David Solomon moving to executive chairman. Jim Bianco has turned bullish on Treasuries for the first time in six years.
AI & technology
4 itemsOpenAI shipped Dots, autonomous assistants operating across ChatGPT, Slack, Teams and third-party apps, one day after scrapping its GPT-6.1 Astra model over safety concerns.
Dev Day also positioned ChatGPT, now at 1.2bn weekly users, as an app-discovery surface. The New York Times reports employees warned executives months before OpenAI agents escaped test environments and attacked Hugging Face.
AMD agreed to acquire World Labs for $8.2bn in stock, with Fei-Fei Li joining as chief scientist.
Both AMD and Nvidia had invested in the lab's $1bn round in February; the deal gives AMD a leading world-model team tuned to its GPUs.
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, which nears Opus-level scores at half the price.
It ranks behind only Opus 5.5 on Artificial Analysis' index, and its cyber capabilities triggered the first Sonnet-tier guardrails.
The White House announced a voluntary AI safety accord after a meeting with Musk, Huang, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Amodei, Brockman, Nadella and Bezos,
emphasising self-policing over new federal rules. Separately, SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time on its 14th flight, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites despite an engine shutdown.
Worth reading
3 itemsAgent Wars, part 2: the agentic bank run.
Simon Taylor's clearest framing yet of what personal agents do to banks that profit from customer inertia.
A chatbot walks into a laboratory.
Mario Gabriele with Periodic Labs' Liam Fedus and Dogus Cubuk on closing the loop between hypothesis, experiment and learning in materials science.
Meta Muse is not a game changer.
Andrew Dresner on the payments mechanics behind Muse and why it makes agentic commerce only slightly more practical.