Brazil heads to a runoff as Nubank's Monzo talks collapse

Brazil's election goes to a 25 October runoff after Lula finishes second to Flávio Bolsonaro in the first round.

Analysts question whether Lula has time to reverse what some read as a deeper rejection of the PT, and Startups.com.br has compared the two platforms on innovation incentives, fiscal policy and the interest-rate path.

The runoff sets the macro backdrop for every Brazilian round and exit priced over the next three weeks.

Nubank's talks to acquire Monzo have collapsed over the UK neobank's desired valuation of up to £10 billion.

Monzo is now in early talks with CVC and Advent International about selling a stake of up to 15% instead. The news lands the same week Nu launched in the US with Lead Bank under conditional OCC approval and rolled out Nu Global, stablecoin-powered accounts across more than 35 countries.

Nu's expansion is proceeding organically rather than through a landmark European acquisition.

Kapital Grupo Financiero has reached a $2 billion valuation and acquired a US AI company for $30 million.

The Mexican SME-banking group is positioning AI as a pillar of its expansion.

A second Kapital headline in a fortnight after its $125 million growth round, and a rare case of a LatAm fintech buying US technology rather than the reverse.

Neon closed the first half of 2026 with its first-ever profit, a net income of R$43.2 million (roughly $8 million).

The swing is nearly R$80 million versus a R$35 million loss in the first half of 2025 and comes a little over a year after the fintech extended its Série E to R$720 million; it now serves more than 27 million customers.

Another Brazilian scaled neobank proving the model can be profitable, which supports valuations across the cohort.

Auro, a São Paulo "wealth building" startup, has taken a first cheque from Link Capital.

Founded in February, the company uses AI to serve customers still organising their finances rather than the R$500,000-plus clients traditional wealth managers target. Amount undisclosed.

Reuse, the Chilean 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 participated. The company runs the trade-in programmes behind Samsung, Falabella and Claro and is preparing entry into new countries, with retail and telco distribution already locked in.

Bewater, the São Paulo growth investor, is raising a $150 million second growth fund through a Delaware LP, per a new SEC filing.

The seven-year-old firm backs growth-stage companies across Latin America.

New domestic growth capital remains scarce in the region, and a US-structured vehicle signals ambitions to raise from international LPs.

MetLife and CNP have shown interest in Prudential's businesses in Mexico and Brazil in a deal that could reach $3 billion.

Separately, the Mexican peso and Brazilian real posted the largest gains against the dollar among regional currencies as the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index fell 0.2%. On the calendar today: Colombian inflation, Peru's monetary policy decision and Chile's trade balance and copper exports.

Capitolis raised a $120 million Series E at a $1.9 billion post-money valuation, led by Citi.

Bank of America, Nomura, Tradeweb, Barclays, BNP Paribas, J.P. Morgan, State Street and UBS also took part, and the capital-markets optimisation platform added $100 million in debt.

Spiko raised a $90 million Series B led by NEA for its tokenised, regulated cash funds.

Index Ventures, Bpifrance, Speedinvest, Flourish Ventures and White Star Capital were among participants; the Paris company has now raised $120 million in total.

Valon Technologies raised a $150 million Series D at a $2.3 billion valuation.

Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz backed the New York startup, which provides mortgage servicers with an operating system and AI agents for loan-servicing workflows.

MNT-Halan has priced an Egyptian IPO to raise about $150 million (EGP 7.84 billion).

The fintech is offering 320 million shares at EGP 24.5, roughly 20% of its capital, with CIB committing up to EGP 2 billion as cornerstone investor; it would be Egypt's largest IPO in dollar terms since e-Finance in 2021.

Stablecoin rails keep moving into mainstream payments.

Stripe will extend its stablecoin cards to more than 100 countries and now has Privy's Henri Stern running crypto, with stablecoin card spending estimated at about $1.2 billion last month, triple a year earlier; Open USD went live on 30 September across Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo with Visa among its five founding partners.

The AI financing rush is accelerating at the very top of the market.

OpenAI is in talks with multiple UAE funds to anchor a $30 billion round, DeepSeek is close to raising about $12 billion at a reported $74.6 billion valuation ahead of a planned IPO, Moonshot AI closed a round at roughly $50 billion, Lambda is reportedly raising up to $4 billion at a $14.5 billion pre-money led by Blackstone and Coatue, and Etched is fielding offers at $40 billion to $50 billion only months after a $21 billion round.

KKR agreed to acquire fund administrator Gen II for $5.1 billion from Hg and General Atlantic.

Gen II serves more than 275 managers representing over $2 trillion in assets; steady fee income keeps drawing private equity into its own plumbing.

The S&P 500 set a new record despite oil near $100 and a 10-year Treasury yield recently at its highest since 2002.

Analysts expect third-quarter earnings to have grown close to 25% year on year, the bet investors are making against the risk backdrop; Nvidia is approaching a $6 trillion valuation.

Vinci raised a $250 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, co-led by Advent, Temasek and Xora.

The Palo Alto startup simulates how complex hardware behaves during design; AMD Ventures, Madrona, Eclipse and Khosla Ventures also participated.

The Pentagon says it has stopped using Anthropic's Claude after the company declined to remove safeguards against mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

The military had used Claude for months in classified work, including through Palantir's Maven system.

Reflection AI released Beam, its first open-weight model, positioned as the US answer to China's open models.

The $25 billion startup says Beam matches Z.ai's GLM-5.2 at a fraction of the compute, with weights due this month under Apache 2.0; it still trails Moonshot's Kimi K3.

AI agents are now implicated in real-world intrusions.

South Korean officials are investigating whether agents were used in cyberattacks on Shinhan, Hana and KB Kookmin, and OpenAI told Australian lawmakers it changed its systems after its agents gained unauthorised access to a Medicare portal in June.

Agent security is becoming a board-level issue for banks everywhere, including in Latin America.

Simon Taylor's podcast with David Vélez, recorded the day after Nubank's US launch,

covers Nu Global's stablecoin stack, the NuFormer credit model and whether the Nu playbook travels.

Andrew Dresner on "agentic optimisation,"

the AI tools that will let consumers automatically re-shop cards and deposits, and why that forces issuers to rethink acquisition economics.

Sifted asks whether Europe's secondaries boom serves only the 1%,

with Revolut now reportedly at $115 billion on the back of successive employee share sales.