Latin America
10 itemsMorgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and KASZEK co-led a ~US$69m Series D for A5X, the Brazilian derivatives exchange and clearing platform, at a reported ~US$518m valuation.
IMC, Jump Trading, Optiver, XTX Markets and ABN AMRO Clearing followed on, a year after a ~US$38m Series C. The cap table is a list of the liquidity providers a B3 challenger needs on day one.
Blockchain Capital led a US$15m round for NG.CASH, the Brazilian financial platform for Gen Z, to expand credit and build crypto and stablecoin products.
NEA led a US$26.5m Series B in July 2025 with monashees, Andreessen Horowitz and 17Sigma. A crypto-native lead points the company's next leg at digital assets.
BBVA Spark provided a ~US$55m credit facility to Galgo, the Chilean motorcycle sales and financing platform operating in Mexico, Colombia and Chile.
Galgo has financed more than 40,000 riders in Mexico through 1,500-plus partner stores, and Uber made a strategic investment in August. Bank-originated venture debt for asset-backed consumer lending is becoming a repeatable structure in the region.
Monashees was selected by BNDESPAR and Finep to manage a new AI-focused venture fund expected to mobilise up to ~US$96m for Brazilian AI-first startups.
The firm is separately raising US$200m for Monashees XI and runs Gama Fund with Google's AI Futures Fund. Public capital is reaching Brazilian AI through the country's most established early-stage manager.
Early-stage activity was broad: Citrino Ventures led ~US$5.8m for Stay, a Brazilian corporate retirement-benefits platform, with Norte Ventures, 17Sigma and Better Tomorrow Ventures.
Chile Ventures led US$2m for OrderEAT, a Mexico-based school-cafeteria payments platform; Amador Capital and Nascent co-led a US$1.8m seed for Nuvia, a Brazilian AI agent platform, their first Brazilian investment; Prosus Ventures led a US$1.5m pre-seed for restaurant AI Emilia AI; and Monashees led an undisclosed seed for Skalar, a New York-based fintech founded by Colombians that finances customer acquisition, alongside a US$125m-plus commitment from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund.
Massotti Ventures launched a US$10m inaugural fund for pre-seed and seed Latin American startups with global ambitions.
It plans 15 to 20 investments with US$50k to US$200k initial tickets across applied AI, fintech, Web3 and SaaS.
Ferrara, a Brazilian investment group with food-industry operations, acquired the Brazilian business of Chilean foodtech NotCo for an undisclosed sum.
NotCo sold its Argentine business and brands to Molinos Río de la Plata in July, having last been valued at a reported US$1.5bn in 2022. The piecemeal disposals read as a retrenchment by one of the region's best-known consumer unicorns.
Ocean Sugar, a Belém-based foodtech founded in May, launched a zero-calorie seaweed-derived sweetener with R$25m (approx. US$4.7m) from Maias Partners, the US manager founded by its own CEO Marcelo Callegari.
It reports R$600k of revenue in its first month and is already discussing exports. São Paulo healthtech Ciera Genomics, projecting R$12m of 2026 revenue, plans a small institutional round this year.
Brazil votes on Sunday 4 October between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro, and Oxford Economics frames the result as a choice between two fiscal paths.
Deficit, debt and inflation have dominated the campaign, and legal advisers already see investment into the region facing headwinds in 2027. Macro turned harder on quarter-end: the Mexican peso was the weakest major emerging currency as carry trades unwound, Colombia's central bank raised rates to 12.25%, Chile's copper output fell 13% to a 15-year low, and the dollar closed its best month since June.
Nubank named Estephany Ley as Mexico CEO, while the region's payments plumbing keeps thickening.
PXP partnered with OKTO Payments for local rails across six Latin American markets; Open Standard and Infinia are connecting Pix, SPEI and Transferencias 3.0 to stablecoin flows; Prometeo launched account verification across 110-plus countries; and Yuno gave merchants access to 30-plus stablecoin providers via Cyclops. JLL estimates Brazil could double its data-centre capacity by 2030 from 706 MW.
Fintech & payments
3 itemsCoinFund led a US$110m Series C for Jeeves, the Orlando-based, Latin America-rooted stablecoin-native corporate card and treasury platform.
AllianceBernstein, Coinbase Ventures, ParaFi, Vista and Wintermute joined with follow-ons from Andreessen Horowitz, CRV, GIC and Y Combinator; total funding now exceeds US$570m.
Mastercard is expanding Agent Pay with trust services, starting with a probability score flagging whether a transaction was initiated by an AI agent.
It is working with Cloudflare and Skyfire, shifting the agentic-commerce question from whether agents can shop to whether banks can trust them to pay.
Stablecoin infrastructure consolidated around incumbents: Open Standard issued a dollar stablecoin backed by Visa, Stripe and Mastercard, Visa and Lloyds completed live settlement trials, and HSBC named its forthcoming token RedCoin.
AllUnity launched a MiCA-regulated USD stablecoin in Europe.
Venture & markets
5 itemsAnthropic's IPO filing is now the defining Q4 listing story, and the leaked numbers are polarising.
Startups.com.br reads the prospectus as a US$42bn net loss in 2025 (US$34bn of it non-cash), revenue up twelvefold to roughly US$4.6bn, and US$518bn of future compute commitments against a mooted US$2tn valuation. Axios weighs the bull case (an open window, a public currency, safety through transparency) against the bear case (losses, mission muddle, a model race in which Anthropic is seen as slightly behind) and concludes that a financing event is unavoidable; only its form is in question.
OpenAI is seeking to raise at least US$30bn at a roughly US$1.4tn valuation, with talks at an early stage.
Sam Altman said investors will be "patient" on an IPO after signalling the company will not list this year.
The FTC has opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other frontier labs and plans subpoena-like demands for documents and testimony on consumer risks.
It came a day after President Trump rejected new federal AI regulation in favour of outside safety auditors agreed with industry.
ElevenLabs doubled its valuation to US$22bn in a US$300m employee tender led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price, with EQT, Goldman Sachs, Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed participating.
Oura, by contrast, delayed its IPO citing market uncertainty.
The EU's €5bn Scaleup Fund can back UK and even US companies, Sifted reports, and its COO wants it to reach €50bn within a decade.
The 2026 Sifted 250 ranked Healf first on a 1,403% two-year revenue CAGR, with Notion Capital topping the investor ranking.
AI & technology
3 itemsOpenAI used DevDay to launch "dots", always-on agents running on GPT-6 Astra from a cloud computer, alongside more than 20 other releases.
GPT-6.1 Sol arrives at a fifth of Astra's price, a Decisions API returns preset answers in about 150 milliseconds, and shared Spaces put teams and their agents in one workspace. The bet is that frontier models, not form factor, decide the always-on agent category against Meta's Muse and Grok Bot.
a16z led a US$28m Series A for Hilbert, which puts AI agents to work on enterprise growth but forbids them from doing maths beyond rounding.
Founder Nazli Tan argues that anything touching money should run on deep-learning models trained on years of customer history, not LLM judgement, so answers are deterministic.
AI infrastructure rounds remain outsized: CScale raised US$145m for optical interconnects co-led by Atreides, Valor and Premji Invest; Efficient Computer raised US$97m-plus at a US$650m valuation led by TQ Ventures; GMI Cloud raised US$223m plus a US$440m credit facility; and Hertha Metals raised ~US$134m for green steel, including US$65m from the US government.
StrictlyVC, Axios Pro Rata
Worth reading
3 itemsStartupeable's conversation with Hilbert's Nazli Tan on why more context makes agents worse and why Silicon Valley growth playbooks fail most enterprises.
Startupeable
Fintech Business Weekly's interview with SEON co-founder Tamas Kadar on how AI, synthetic identities and data breaches have reshaped fraud.
Fintech Business Weekly
Sifted and London Business School's report finding that one in five companies captures nearly three-quarters of AI's economic gains.
Sifted