Jeeves raises $110m on stablecoin rails as Brazil goes to the polls

Jeeves raises $110m led by CoinFund to scale its stablecoin-native corporate card across the Americas.

The B2B spend and payments fintech, which rebuilt its model around blockchain settlement this year, will expand the stablecoin card from 25 to 35 countries, adding Argentina, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay to an operation that has run in Brazil since 2024. Transaction volume has tripled in a year to an annualised $5bn, revenue is up four times in 14 months, and roughly $1.5bn annualised is now settled in stablecoins, up from near zero eight months ago; valuation was not disclosed.

It is one of the clearest data points yet that stablecoin rails are winning real B2B volume in the region rather than remaining a crypto-native niche.

Brazil votes on Sunday with Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro tied in the latest Datafolha poll.

The race has been upended by the Banco Master fraud case around jailed former owner Daniel Vorcaro, with police probing Bolsonaro's dealings with the banker and Lula suffering an anti-establishment backlash after revelations tied the Supreme Court to the scandal. With borrowing costs still punishing and the fiscal outlook alarming investors, the real, local bonds and equities face a binary event; Bloomberg Línea flags it as the week's key regional risk ahead of US CPI on 14 October. — Bloomberg, Bloomberg Línea

Nubank ends talks to acquire UK challenger bank Monzo.

Per the FT, the Brazilian neobank has walked away, and Monzo may now court private equity instead.

A Nubank-Monzo tie-up would have been the first large cross-Atlantic consolidation led by a Latin American fintech; its collapse keeps Nubank's expansion story focused on Mexico, Colombia and the US rather than Europe.

Embedded finance is becoming a revenue line for Brazilian software companies.

Wellness platform Wellhub has put a further R$100m into the FIDC it uses to lend to partner gyms, one year after the first R$100m tranche, and ERP vendor Sankhya has launched Finance, a credit-decisioning and marketplace product that targets 50 lending partners within 12 months and a sub-acquirer licence within two years. GlobalData projects Brazil's embedded finance market at $18bn by 2030, driven by Open Finance and banking-as-a-service infrastructure.

Country risk rose sharply in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador in September.

Bloomberg Línea's monthly tally shows spreads widening across the three, even as Citi says foreign investors are taking 10-year Argentine risk and anticipates a new wave of Argentine IPOs.

Mexican peso posts its first gain of the week; Colombian peso unlikely to revisit COP 3,000.

The peso advanced as the Bloomberg Dollar Spot index fell 0.2% after a weak US payrolls print, while Bloomberg Línea argues that structural headwinds make a return to a COP 3,000 dollar a thing of the past. Monday's data to watch: Mexico gross fixed investment and Colombian exports.

Swift is building a cross-border gateway linking Pix to Bizum and PayID.

The idea is to let users send money abroad with a mobile number or email rather than bank details, connecting rather than replacing domestic instant-payment schemes.

Pix becoming a node in a Swift-operated international layer would extend Brazil's rails well beyond its borders and raises the bar for remittance fintechs.

Sibos closes with Swift's Ledger at the centre of bank tokenisation plans.

Oracle is integrating its tokenised deposit infrastructure with Swift Ledger so banks can settle tokenised deposits across institutions; BNY launched Pay-to-Wallet to let banks pay directly into digital wallets over existing rails; Mastercard introduced Advanced B2B Analytics to identify suppliers likely to accept cards; Chainlink shipped CCIP 2.0 with compliance controls that travel with tokenised assets; and Mizuho and the IFC set up a $1bn risk-sharing facility for SME supply-chain finance in Asia-Pacific.

Mynt, the company behind GCash, prices a Philippine IPO at roughly a $7bn valuation.

The listing will raise about $844m, potentially $970m with the over-allotment, in one of the Philippine Stock Exchange's largest ever offerings. A relevant comp for emerging-market wallet businesses contemplating public exits.

Halluminate raises $30m Series A led by Oak HC/FT to build AI training environments for financial work.

Y Combinator, Orange Collective, FT Partners and Heavybit joined; total raised is $38.5m. Separately, NYC payments-infrastructure startup Walapay closed a $4.6m seed led by Generative Ventures with Commerce Ventures and Polygon participating. — Axios Pro Rata, StrictlyVC

US payrolls add just 29k in September; unemployment ticks up to 4.2%.

Another 60k jobs were revised away from prior months, cutting bets on further Fed tightening and pushing the Nasdaq 100 to a record close. Deutsche Bank warns that inflation, high yields and weaker fiscal positions are eroding the cushions that protected markets for decades, implying more volatility ahead. — Axios Pro Rata, Bloomberg Línea, Bloomberg

Europe enters the age of the scaleup fund.

Sifted reports the EU's €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund can already invest in UK and US companies despite neither being an LP, while a race is on to run the UK's new £1bn Scale-Up Fund. Fund COO Sebastian Frisk puts Europe's capital gap at €800bn a year and wants the vehicle to grow to a €50bn-€100bn platform. New funds this week: Headline $400m for its eighth early-stage fund, Dig Ventures $120m for AI infrastructure, Sofinnova Partners €82m for medtech.

Supabase raises $150m led by GIC and acquires Turso.

CapitalG, IronArc and SquarePeg joined the round for the open-source Postgres backend, which is increasingly the default data layer for AI apps. — Axios Pro Rata, StrictlyVC

Large rounds: Armadin $255.5m, Varda Space $251m, Reverion $175m, FieldAI in talks for $700m.

Kevin Mandia's Armadin raised at a $2.5bn-plus valuation co-led by a16z and Accel; Varda's Series D was co-led by Lux and Natural Capital; Germany's Reverion closed a Series B led by Kembara with Allianz and KfW Capital; and robotics software company FieldAI is reportedly negotiating a round at $10bn, five times last year's valuation. — StrictlyVC, Axios Pro Rata

Firmus seeks a US$30.3bn valuation in a A$5bn Australian IPO.

The Blackstone- and Nvidia-backed data centre operator was valued at more than US$10.5bn two months ago, and some prospective investors are balking at its $30bn debt load and short track record. — Axios Pro Rata, StrictlyVC

Google wins dismissal of antitrust suits brought by Chegg and Penske Media.

The ruling undercuts publishers' attempt to use competition law against AI-generated search summaries and shifts the battleground toward copyright, licensing and legislation.

OpenAI fires three safety researchers and is subpoenaed by California's attorney general.

The researchers allegedly shared confidential information with an outside AI safety organisation, while the subpoena is part of a cybersecurity investigation following incidents involving OpenAI agents. Separately, Broadcom has begun amassing $60bn of chip financing to benefit Anthropic and others, a deal investors are reading as a test of appetite for the AI buildout. — StrictlyVC, Bloomberg

Tavus previews Griffin, a video model that 48% of testers mistook for a human.

The "Human Interaction Model" watches, listens and reacts in real time; access is limited to trusted testers while disclosure features are built. Meanwhile Amazon has blocked Meta's new Muse agents from shopping on its store, an early sign of platform resistance to third-party AI agents. — The Rundown AI, Bloomberg Línea

Sifted on why a €5bn fund "is not plugging anything" and what a €100bn scaleup platform would take.

Useful framing for anyone thinking about late-stage capital gaps outside the US, Latin America included.

Brian Chesky on why chatbots are the wrong interface for commerce and AI agents need their own operating system.

A clear-eyed product view from a CEO who has been slow and deliberate on AI.

Bloomberg's deep dive on Brazil's election and the Banco Master scandal that reshaped it.

The essential pre-read before Sunday's vote.