Latin America
10 itemsNubank says it is not pursuing Monzo, ending a week of speculation.
The Brazilian bank dismissed reports of acquisition talks with the UK neobank, and Sifted reports the negotiations have been scrapped less than a week after they emerged. For now Nubank's international story remains Mexico and Colombia.
Selbetti acquires Botdesigner to push into healthcare automation.
The Brazilian group, on its way to R$1bn in revenue, bought the Florianópolis company that automates the patient journey for more than 200 health institutions reaching over 20 million patients; terms were not disclosed and the operations are integrated from 1 October within Selbetti Customer Experience.
BTG Pactual lands a EUR 100m facility from Spain's COFIDES.
Arranged by EMGA, the debt line will fund sustainable and impact-oriented lending in Brazil and takes EMGA's facilitated investment in the country to nearly US$2bn. Development-finance money continues to be a reliable funding leg for Brazilian credit.
Colombia: after Banco de la República's surprise hike, Goldman doubts a repeat.
The central bank's unexpected increase has already fed through to pricing, with Bloomberg Línea noting that loans will become more expensive and harder to obtain. For fintech lenders in Colombia the cost of funding just moved against them again.
Latin American currencies closed Q3 at two speeds.
Paraguay and Colombia managed to detach from the pack while the dollar pressured most of the region; on the day, losses dominated regional FX and the Bloomberg Dollar Spot index rose 0.4%. Bloomberg Línea also asks how far the real can fall under election and fiscal pressure in Brazil, where industrial production prints today.
Argentina: miners pencil in US$7bn a year, BlackRock still calls it "a trade".
Companies anticipate annual mining investment of around US$7bn, while BlackRock warns Argentina will remain a tactical trade rather than a structural allocation until it breaks with its track record.
dLocal extends local payments to LinkedIn across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Chile.
The Uruguayan processor will enable local-currency card payments for LinkedIn's professional users in four markets; its Paymentpedia research puts chargebacks at 3.7% of regional e-commerce orders. Argentine fintech Depay also added Venezuela as its sixth market for QR payments and remittances.
Ripple partners with CSD BR to put Brazilian asset records on the XRP Ledger.
The collaboration uses the ledger as an additional layer for recording and auditing financial assets, pairing regulated depository infrastructure with blockchain rails for tokenisation in Brazil.
Nubank is the reference case in Simon Taylor's "Fintech is Dead" essay.
Taylor cites Nubank's 140 million customers served at roughly $1 a month against $17.10 in monthly revenue, and its nuFormer foundation model reading raw transaction tokens, as evidence that the next winners will be AI-first and token-first rather than mobile-first.
Flash Benefícios and iFood on how Brazilian scale-ups are reorganising around AI.
Flash's CEO says the new PAT rules turned its once-contested benefits model into the market default, with R$150m from an August Series D led by Battery Ventures to fund a horizontal HR platform; iFood's people chief describes 27,000 internal AI agents built in ten months and a hiring process that now asks whether a role needs a person or an agent.
Fintech & payments
3 itemsKalshi is reportedly raising about $1bn at a $40bn valuation, with Sequoia and Wellington in talks to co-lead.
That is nearly double March's $22bn mark, on roughly $4bn of annualised revenue and more than $40bn of monthly volume; an IPO could come as early as 2027. Predicted's analysis is less flattering: Kalshi's ether perps traded 52 times open interest on 1 October versus 1.3x on Binance, the CFTC is examining $5bn of trades, and Kalshi has filed to end its liquidity incentive programme.
Open USD goes live with Visa, Mastercard and Stripe among the founding partners.
The consortium stablecoin returns reserve earnings to partners after a small fee and charges no mint or burn fees, which Simon Taylor argues removes the objections banks have to private issuers like Circle. Lloyds and Visa also settled $750,000 in USDC over a seven-day pilot, with funds arriving in under an hour.
BCG sees payments revenue growth slowing from 8% to 5% a year in developed markets through 2030.
The author reads the deceleration as concentration rather than weakness: the top five US issuers handle roughly 80% of volume and use scale to compress pricing, favouring consolidation.
Venture & markets
5 itemsAnthropic targets a mid-November IPO as its prospectus details Broadcom's $42bn loan.
The company could begin marketing the week of 9 November, with an investor day on 14 October; the filing shows Broadcom lending up to $42bn against a $125.2bn five-year compute lease, a stark example of circular AI financing.
Mega-rounds keep clustering in AI infrastructure and defence.
Armadin raised $255.5m Series B at a $2.5bn-plus valuation co-led by a16z and Accel; Varda Space raised $251m Series D co-led by Lux and Natural Capital; GMI Cloud raised $223m plus a $445m credit facility; and CScale raised $145m Series C with Nvidia and Intel Capital participating.
Sycamore is in talks to sell Boots for about $9bn, a year after the $24bn Walgreens take-private.
A sale to part of the Weston family would be an early win and let Sycamore focus on reviving Walgreens' US business. Salesforce also agreed to buy AI customer-research startup Listen Labs, which had raised $100m from Ribbit and Sequoia.
Q4 opens with a bond respite but oil above $100.
Treasuries rallied on European tensions, Fed governor Jefferson suggested more time before further hikes, and Friday's payrolls are the next test; Brent is back above $100 and Axa warns long yields have not found a self-stabilising level. Russell Clark argues the TLT short loses effectiveness as yields approach 8%.
Sifted Summit: sovereignty, growth capital and Stebbings walking back "996".
European tech's priorities are growth-stage funding, EU Inc and owning more of the compute and launch stack; Metaview raised €53.1m Series C led by Insight. Harry Stebbings said he regrets the literalness of his 996 comments.
AI & technology
3 itemsGoogle unveils Gemini 4 Argon, but only vetted security teams can use it.
Google says it beats GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 on 13 of 19 benchmarks and it debuted first on Arena's text leaderboard.
Regulatory heat on frontier labs: FTC probe, California subpoena, OpenAI firings.
The FTC has opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and others with subpoena-like demands; California's attorney general subpoenaed OpenAI over cybersecurity risks after its agents hacked Hugging Face; and OpenAI fired three safety researchers for sharing information with an outside safety group.
Factory's CEO accuses a board adviser of spying for Cognition.
Matan Grinberg says Chris Degnan, who joined Cognition as CRO hours later, shared confidential information; Degnan denies it. The spat follows Factory's $200m raise at $5bn and Cognition's $2bn at $48bn.
Worth reading
3 items"Fintech is Dead" by Simon Taylor
a map of finance after fintech built on intelligence tokens, value tokens and agents as customers, with Nubank and Revolut as the proof points.
"Is Kalshi's Volume Real?"
a careful breakdown of volume-to-open-interest ratios and what a CFTC finding would mean for a $40bn raise.
Brian Chesky on why chatbots are the wrong interface for travel
and why Airbnb is building "multiplayer" AI over the next six months.