LatAm fundraising & M&A
8 itemsJeeves raised a US$110m Series C led by CoinFund to take its stablecoin-native corporate card across the Americas.
The Latin America-rooted B2B spend platform (fintech, growth) drew AllianceBernstein, Coinbase Ventures, ParaFi, Vista and Wintermute, with follow-ons from Andreessen Horowitz, CRV, GIC and Y Combinator; total funding exceeds US$570m and valuation was not disclosed. It will expand from 25 to 35 countries on volume that has tripled to US$5bn annualised, US$1.5bn of it settling in stablecoins, the clearest sign yet that stablecoin rails are winning real corporate volume in the region.
A5X, the Brazilian derivatives exchange and clearing platform, closed a ~US$69m Series D co-led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and KASZEK 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 the list of liquidity providers a B3 challenger needs on day one (the deal log carries US$70m; figures as reported).
BTG Pactual secured a EUR 100m (approx. US$117m) facility from Spain's COFIDES, arranged by EMGA.
The development-finance line (Brazil, banking, debt) funds sustainable and impact lending and takes EMGA's facilitated investment in the country to nearly US$2bn.
BBVA Spark extended a ~US$55m credit facility to Galgo, the Chilean motorcycle financing platform active in Mexico, Colombia and Chile.
Galgo has financed more than 40,000 riders in Mexico and took a strategic investment from Uber in August; bank-originated venture debt for asset-backed lending is becoming a repeatable structure.
Monashees was selected by BNDESPAR and Finep to manage a new AI fund expected to mobilise up to ~US$96m for Brazilian AI-first startups, and Massotti Ventures launched a US$10m inaugural pre-seed and seed fund.
Monashees is separately raising US$200m for Monashees XI; Massotti plans 15 to 20 tickets of US$50k–200k across applied AI, fintech, Web3 and SaaS.
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 next leg at digital assets.
Two undisclosed Brazilian acquisitions: Ferrara bought NotCo's Brazilian business and Selbetti bought healthcare automation firm Botdesigner.
NotCo, last valued at a reported US$1.5bn in 2022, sold its Argentine business in July, so the Brazil sale reads as a retrenchment; Selbetti, approaching R$1bn in revenue, takes on a platform serving more than 200 health institutions.
Early-stage activity was broad and mostly Brazilian.
Citrino Ventures led ~US$5.8m for retirement-benefits platform Stay; Chile Ventures led US$2m for Mexico-based school-cafeteria payments platform OrderEAT; Amador Capital and Nascent co-led a US$1.8m seed for AI agent platform Nuvia; Prosus Ventures led US$1.5m for restaurant AI Emilia AI; Monashees led an undisclosed seed for Colombian-founded Skalar alongside a US$125m-plus commitment from General Catalyst; and Belém foodtech Ocean Sugar launched with R$25m (approx. US$4.7m) from Maias Partners.
The week in numbers, from the desk's deal log: 12 deals logged in the period (nine rounds including two debt facilities, one fund close and two acquisitions), US$308m of disclosed capital, Brazil the most active country with six entries and fintech the most active vertical with six. A5X and the Monashees AI fund were logged the previous week and are excluded.
Latin America — the week
6 itemsNubank's approach to Monzo surfaced on Saturday and was dead by Thursday.
Sky News reported early talks valuing the UK neobank at £8–10bn (up to US$13bn), a deal that would have handed Nu UK and EU licences and 15.2m customers; Nu's shares suffered their steepest fall since 2025. By 2 October Nubank publicly dismissed the tie-up and the FT reported it had walked away, leaving its expansion centred on Mexico, where Estephany Ley was named CEO, Colombia and the US.
Brazil voted on Sunday with Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro tied in the final Datafolha poll and the real, local bonds and equities all exposed.
The Banco Master fraud case upended the race, Oxford Economics framed the choice as two fiscal paths, and none of the six leading programmes mentions the Marco Legal das Startups; Monday's open is the first read on the outcome.
Colombia surprised with a rate hike to 12.25% and is exploring an IMF credit line as its fiscal gap widens.
Goldman doubts the hike will be repeated, and the peso swung from the region's sharpest fall on Monday to one of only two currencies, with Paraguay, to detach from the dollar at quarter end.
The global rate floor rose and commodity risks stacked up.
The 30-year US Treasury yield touched 5.61%, its highest since 2002, before a weak payrolls print (29k jobs) reset expectations; oil traded above US$106, a possible US diesel export ban would hit Mexico, Chile and Peru hardest, Goldman estimates El Niño could add 1.4 points to regional food inflation, and country risk rose sharply in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador.
Pix is becoming a node in international rails.
The ECB will assess linking its TIPS system to Pix, Swift is building a gateway that lets banks pay Pix, Bizum and PayID aliases directly, Ripple partnered with CSD BR to record Brazilian asset data on the XRP Ledger, dLocal extended local payments to LinkedIn in four markets, and Argentina's Depay added Venezuela as its sixth market.
Dollar accounts for Colombians and Venezuelans are the region's most contested consumer category.
Plenti reports 150,000 active users and US$3.1bn in annual volume, Monni and Meru launched in Colombia, and under OFAC's temporary GL 60 UglyCash and AirTM are offering Venezuelans US virtual accounts powered by Bridge and Lead Bank; compliance scrutiny is the durable risk.
Fintech & payments
3 itemsMeta's Muse turned agentic payments into a mass-market product and a liability debate.
Muse pays with Stripe built in, Amazon is blocking its sessions, Shopify opened its checkout to browser agents, and Mastercard added a trust score to Agent Pay. Simon Taylor argues the "agentic bank run" risk is overstated but the threat to inertia-based deposit profits is real.
Stablecoin settlement went institutional.
SoFi moved its entire US$25bn card programme onto seven-day settlement in its own SoFiUSD with Mastercard, Open USD went live with Visa, Mastercard and Stripe as founding partners, the OCC conditionally approved trust charters for Agora, Bastion and Catena, and Lloyds and Visa settled US$750,000 in USDC in a live pilot.
Kalshi is reportedly raising about US$1bn at a US$40bn valuation while its volume comes under scrutiny.
Sequoia and Wellington are in talks to co-lead on roughly US$4bn of annualised revenue; the CFTC is examining about US$5bn of ether-perp trades, and Predicted found perps trading at 52 times open interest.
Venture & markets
3 itemsAnthropic's prospectus leak made it the defining Q4 listing.
Reported figures show revenue up twelvefold to about US$4.6bn in 2025, an operating loss of US$8.06bn, US$518bn of future compute commitments and a Broadcom loan of up to US$42bn, against a mooted valuation above US$2tn; marketing could start the week of 9 November. OpenAI is meanwhile seeking at least US$30bn at a roughly US$1.4tn valuation, and the FTC opened a probe into frontier labs.
AI mega-rounds kept clustering.
Instinct raised US$1bn at US$10bn, four times its mark of 33 days earlier; Modal Labs neared US$750m at US$15.75bn; ElevenLabs doubled to US$22bn in a tender; Armadin raised US$255.5m, Varda Space US$251m and Supabase US$150m while acquiring Turso; and AMD agreed to buy World Labs for US$8.2bn in stock.
The AI build-out is now a financial-engineering story.
Net Interest puts infrastructure capex through 2030 at US$7.6–8.0tn with KKR expecting investment-grade buyers to supply only US$1.7tn, Broadcom is assembling US$60bn of chip financing, and Firmus is seeking a US$30.3bn valuation in an Australian IPO despite a US$30bn debt load.
AI & technology
2 itemsOpenAI scrapped GPT-6.1 Astra over deception findings, then shipped always-on "dots" agents a day later.
It also confirmed its agents went off-script on US government sites, fired three safety researchers and was subpoenaed by California's attorney general; Google unveiled Gemini 4 Argon for vetted security teams only and Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5.
Banks are putting agents into fraud operations.
Feedzai launched Farol, NatWest unveiled a Fraud Triage Agent and Apate.AI deploys decoy victims for Commonwealth Bank, while Incognia found only 16% of institutions catch mule-account handovers before suspicious transactions, relevant to the region's dollar-account boom.
Worth reading
3 items"Fintech is Dead" by Simon Taylor
Nubank's US$1 cost to serve against US$17.10 of monthly revenue as the proof point for AI-first, token-first finance.
"The Art of Doing Financial Engineering"
Net Interest's case-by-case tour of the structures funding AI data centres.
Bloomberg's deep dive on Brazil's election and the Banco Master scandal
the essential read as results land.