Latin America
8 items
NubankM&A Brazil United Kingdom United StatesNubank walks away from Monzo after the UK neobank held out for £10bn.
Monzo is now in early talks with CVC and Advent International about selling a stake of up to 15%. Nubank, valued at roughly US$65bn, said it would instead focus on its home market and the US, a signal that its international ambitions remain disciplined on price.
BTG PactualPolicy Peru BrazilBTG Pactual obtains a licence to operate as a bank in Peru with US$100m of initial capital.
The Brazilian investment bank adds a fully licensed entity in Lima to its regional footprint, deepening competition in Peruvian corporate and wealth banking.
Argentina's central bank rejects near-term crypto integration for banks.
Superintendent Juan Curutchet said the 2022 prohibition on financial institutions offering crypto services will not change this year, leaving the question for a possible second Milei term. Banking groups continue to build institutional stablecoin projects through separate entities, so the regulatory gap persists between Argentina's retail crypto adoption and its licensed banks.
Pomelo Argentina Brazil MexicoPomelo's chief executive argues cash, cards, real-time payments and stablecoins should converge rather than compete.
Gaston Irigoyen set out a view in which payments take whichever rail is cheapest and fastest for a given corridor, a framing relevant to Latin American issuers already routing between Pix, SPEI and card networks.
Copper touches a two-week high after a fatal accident at Chile's El Teniente mine.
Traders weighed the supply impact of the incident at Codelco's largest underground operation against improving rate expectations and rising global demand for the metal. The episode adds to operational concerns around Chilean state production even as prices support fiscal revenue.
Argentina's September inflation print lands today, with consumer indicators still mostly in the red.
BBVA has published year-end projections for inflation and the peso, and Bloomberg Línea's consumption tracker shows more than half of its indicators negative despite recent improvement. The data arrive alongside the IMF's semi-annual World Economic Outlook, released from its meetings in Bangkok.
Colombia's earthquake dealt an additional blow to an already weak housing market, with sales plunging.
The shock compounds an existing slowdown and is a headwind for proptech and mortgage originators. Separately, Mexican companies are reported to be more affected by local problems than by trade risk, a reminder that domestic policy and security rather than tariffs are driving corporate performance.
Oxfam warns that IMF-mandated austerity leaves indebted countries doubly vulnerable ahead of the Fund's annual meetings.
Countries under IMF programmes are on average almost twice as exposed to the economic fallout of the US-Israel war with Iran and to climate shocks, according to the report, with direct relevance for Argentina and other Latin American borrowers. In currency markets, the Costa Rican colón posted the strongest gain against the dollar among the few regional markets open on Monday.
Fintech & payments
3 items
RampRound United StatesRamp raises US$1.85bn at a US$60bn valuation, led by Dragoneer and Thrive Capital.
Founders Fund also participated, and the pre-money valuation is up from US$44bn in June when the company raised US$750m. Ramp is positioning itself as a platform where finance teams supervise AI agents handling procurement, accounting and payments, making spending controls and audit trails the product rather than the card.
OPay prepares a New York IPO at around US$4bn after first-half revenue jumped 137% to US$467m.
Lending has overtaken payments as the SoftBank-backed Lagos fintech's largest business, Standard Bank has agreed a proposed US$185m private placement for a stake of up to 4.99%, and the Nigerian Exchange is lobbying for a secondary listing.
Blockchain.comPolicy United StatesBlockchain.com files with the CFTC for exchange and broker licences to offer event contracts in the US.
It is the twelfth company to apply for a designated contract market licence this year, and four more tribes have launched prediction-market apps built on Kalshi's rails, taking its tribal partners to five, while three tribes continue to sue.
Venture & markets
6 itemsNATO defence-tech startups have raised a record US$27.1bn in 2026, with Europe's share rising to 21%.
Dealroom's State of Defence Tech report counts seven US$1bn-plus rounds including Helsing and Quantum Systems, puts European defence VC on track for US$10.5bn this year, and notes that US investors now supply 47% of European defence funding, above the domestic share for the first time.
OpenAIMarkets United StatesOpenAI told investors annualised revenue was about US$50bn at end-September, some US$20bn below the widely reported figure.
The gap reflects partner gross revenue in the higher number; Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave fell 3–8% on the news as OpenAI opens early talks on a roughly US$30bn round ahead of an expected 2027 IPO.
LambdaRound United StatesLambda is raising up to US$4bn led by Blackstone and Coatue ahead of a planned 2027 IPO.
The Nvidia-backed neocloud's backlog rose from US$15bn in June to US$50bn in September, driven by a US$35bn commitment from Anthropic.
DeepSeekRound China Hong Kong SAR ChinaDeepSeek nears US$12bn at a US$75bn valuation as Moonshot AI files for a Hong Kong IPO at up to US$50bn.
Tencent and CATL are among DeepSeek's largest backers ahead of an IPO planned for early 2027; Moonshot's listing could raise US$3–5bn but faces a US$700m shareholder dispute.
IonQ agrees to buy cybersecurity firm Elisity in an all-stock deal worth up to US$1.3bn.
The price includes US$150m of performance-based earn-outs; Elisity had raised just over US$70m from investors including Insight Partners and TCV.
US earnings season opens with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citigroup and Wells Fargo amid elevated expectations.
Bloomberg Intelligence expects S&P 500 profits up 25% year on year and AI-linked companies up 47%, while Houthi attacks on Saudi airports, the deadliest since the Iran war began, kept crude near US$93 and raised the risk of a wider conflict drawing in the US.
AI & technology
5 items
Meta United StatesMeta releases Muse Wonder and Wonder Full, its first frontier models since the AI reorganisation.
The company claims performance comparable to Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra and emphasises long-term memory for its Muse agent.
Mistral France EuropeMistral unveils Mistral Large 4, a one-trillion-parameter open-weight model trained on its own European infrastructure.
Weights are due on 27 October; the model has 49bn active parameters and is pitched at enterprises and governments running sovereign AI, even as a UN-backed report warns that "abliterated" open models stripped of guardrails are proliferating.
Atomic Machines emerges from stealth with US$250m and an AI-guided factory that builds micro-machines from code.
Led by former Uber self-driving chief Jeff Holden, its first product is a fingertip-sized power switch for AI data centres.
Nous ResearchRound United StatesNous Research raises a US$90m Series B at a US$1.5bn valuation, led by Robot Ventures.
Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital participated; the open-source Hermes agent has been cloned more than 24 million times.
The UK is drawing up mandatory safety reporting for frontier AI companies as Microsoft's Satya Nadella urges an "emergency brake" for agentic models.
Nadella said firms should treat powerful models as potential insider threats; the IMF separately warned of AI's disruptive effect on labour markets and taxation.
Worth reading
3 itemsInside San Francisco's growing ecosystem for European founders
, on founder houses, O-1 visas and VCs tripling their European allocation from the US side.
The State of Defence Tech 2026
, Dealroom's report on a vertical whose ecosystem value has grown 28x in a decade.
Why open-weight models cut both ways
, on the trade-off between European AI sovereignty and the spread of guardrail-free model variants.