Latin America
9 itemsBrazilian markets rallied hard after Flávio Bolsonaro's surprise first-round lead over Lula.
Bolsonaro took 47% to Lula's 45% on Sunday, forcing a 25 October runoff and making him the favourite. On Monday the Ibovespa set a record, the real gained more than 4% against the dollar and several stocks rose over 20%; in New York, XP jumped 33% and StoneCo 24%. JPMorgan estimates roughly 22% upside for MSCI Brazil on expectations of tighter fiscal policy and lower long-term rates, the opposite bet to Wall Street, where the 10-year Treasury touched 5.34%, its highest since 2002.
Reuse, the Chilean electronics trade-in and refurbishment platform, raised a $21 million Series A led by At One Ventures.
Coppel Ventures, ALIVE Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, IGNIA and Dalus Capital also participated. The eight-year-old company runs trade-in programmes across Latin America; a climate-focused lead alongside a Mexican retail group points to a Mexico push.
Bewater is raising a $150 million second growth fund, according to a new SEC filing.
The seven-year-old São Paulo firm backs growth-stage companies across Latin America and is structuring the vehicle as a Delaware limited partnership. A new local growth vehicle matters in a late-stage market short of domestic capital since 2022.
Nubank's takeover talks with Monzo have collapsed over valuation.
Monzo wanted as much as £10 billion; the London digital bank is now in early talks with CVC and Advent International about selling a stake of up to 15%. The failed approach confirms Nubank is shopping for a route into Europe, with price discipline.
Olist reached breakeven in August and plans to enter Brazil's card-terminal market.
CEO Tiago Dalvi said August was the first full month of positive EBITDA and cash generation, repeated in September. The company intends to invest around R$500 million (approx. $95 million) from own cash between late 2026 and 2028 in product, acquisitions and customer acquisition, with a maquininha product already in testing for a 2027 launch against Stone and PagSeguro.
Binance will tighten rules on Brazilian users' international crypto transfers from 1 November.
Under Central Bank of Brazil Resolution BCB 521/2025, users must state the purpose and counterparty of transfers, and the exchange will report transaction details to the central bank monthly.
DiDi and Pomelo extended their prepaid-card partnership from Colombia to Mexico.
The cards let DiDi Shop delivery drivers pay merchants directly for customer orders while DiDi funds them in real time and controls usage limits.
Zoho's Brazilian revenue grew 31.4% in the first half of 2026, making Brazil its third-largest market.
Country CEO Rodrigo Vaca said Brazil trails only India and the United States and that he is targeting second place in the short to medium term. DXC and CrewAI also announced a partnership to bring agentic AI to Latin American enterprises.
Migration flows through the Darién have collapsed, with Brazil and Uruguay emerging as destinations.
Official figures show 280 crossings in January–June 2026 against 201,063 in the same period of 2024, as Cuban and Haitian migrants redirect south. Bloomberg Línea also flagged Colombia's refusal to raise fuel prices as a building fiscal problem.
Fintech & payments
4 itemsOpenPayd is preparing a 2027 Nasdaq listing via its merger with Titan Acquisition Corp.
The UK payments-infrastructure company expects the SPAC deal to close this year at a valuation around $1.15 billion, citing more than $240 billion in annualised transaction volume and over $85 million in annualised recurring revenue. It already holds 43 US state licences to support a stablecoin-led US expansion.
Valon Technologies raised a $150 million Series D at a $2.3 billion valuation led by Ribbit Capital.
The New York company sells an operating system and AI agents for mortgage servicers; Andreessen Horowitz returned as an insider. Modern Treasury applied to form a national trust bank for digital-asset custody, and Revolut began offering UK personal loans.
Prediction-market valuations keep climbing: Novig is reportedly raising at up to $2 billion and Kalshi at about $40 billion.
Novig's rumoured round would be four times its February valuation, after it crossed $1 billion in notional volume in September. Kalshi is in advanced talks for roughly $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation even as its share of US volume slipped from 86% to 79.6% in September, with Polymarket US and DraftKings' DKeX gaining.
Cboe and Robinhood plan SEC-regulated binary "KPI contracts" on company earnings metrics this month.
The products would start with 23 US-listed names and cover more than 100 line items, cleared through Cboe's clearing house and traded from ordinary brokerage accounts, pending SEC approval.
Venture & markets
5 itemsSchneider Electric agreed to buy industrial-software maker PTC for $22.6 billion.
The $205-per-share offer is a 42.3% premium to Friday's close and would be Schneider's largest acquisition, topping its $11 billion purchase of Aveva. Software mega-mergers have been rare this year amid AI-driven uncertainty.
Etched is fielding funding offers at $40–50 billion, barely two months after raising $700 million at $21 billion.
The AI-chip startup, whose last round was led by customer Jane Street, said in July it had $1 billion in orders. Separately, Munich's RobCo sold $40 million of mostly employee-held shares in a secondary valuing it above $1 billion, and ElevenLabs doubled its valuation to $22 billion in a tender offer.
The SEC called for more rigour in private-asset valuations, with particular focus on private credit.
Managers were reminded that fair-value measurements must be timely and reflect macro events, and that boilerplate disclosure of valuation inputs may not suffice. Notable Capital is raising its tenth fund, and Linse Capital closed a $75 million early-stage fund.
European fiscal and political strain dominated global markets.
The euro fell to its weakest since May 2025 as French CDS spreads widened and Spain's Pedro Sánchez called an early election for 29 November after losing a housing vote. Russell Clark reads Marine Le Pen's proposed constitutional debt brake as bullish for French bonds even as macro signals stay euro-bearish.
The EU's €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund can now invest in UK companies, capped at 5% of capital for now.
Managed by EQT, the fund has backed Mistral and Lovable since August; the UK AI minister is also moving quickly on reforming non-compete clauses.
AI & technology
3 itemsThe Pentagon says it has stopped using Anthropic's Claude after the company refused to remove safeguards against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
The military had used Claude for classified research and operations, including through Palantir's Maven system. Sam Altman, by contrast, told Politico society should accept some AI harms in exchange for broad availability.
OpenAI's safety-report lead David Robinson quit, calling the company's culture "broken" in an essay in The Atlantic.
Robinson oversaw reports for 12 frontier launches and drafted the current Preparedness Framework; his exit follows the firing of three researchers over information shared with an outside safety group.
The White House push to rebrand AI as "super intelligence" triggered a speculative run on Slovenia's .si domain.
Registrations rose 2,199% to 46,000 in September, briefly outselling .ai, though most were bought for resale. Elon Musk said SpaceXAI will be renamed SpaceXSI.
Worth reading
3 itemsSimon Taylor's essay arguing fintech is dead as an investment category
, because mobile-first, cloud and API-first are now table stakes, as Fintech Brainfood rebrands to Brainfood and folds in Tokenized and Predicted.
Predicted's "Is Kalshi's Volume Real?"
, on how the Volume Incentive Program paid traders per contract during Kalshi's record September.
Bloomberg Línea's reporting on the new map of Latin American migration
, with Guyana, Brazil and Uruguay replacing the Darién route north.