Quiet weekend: catastrophe insurance, tokenised-fund liquidity and Harvard's venture-driven year

Lenovo has appointed Diego Majdalani to lead its Latin America business, succeeding Sergio Buniac.

Majdalani previously ran Dell Technologies' regional operation, so the move keeps the leadership of one of the region's largest hardware distributors in the hands of an executive with an existing enterprise and channel network.

With no regional funding rounds, exits or fund closes reported in the newsletters received over the weekend, the Latin American desk is quiet ahead of a week dominated by Brazil's final pre-runoff debates and Money20/20 in Las Vegas.

Fission raised a US$10m Series A led by Pantera Capital to provide early liquidity to investors in tokenised funds.

The two-year-old New York company gives eligible investors access to capital ahead of scheduled redemption windows; Circle Ventures, Borderless Capital, New Form, gumi Cryptos Capital and Anthony Scaramucci also participated.

As asset managers tokenise private-credit and treasury funds, secondary liquidity is the missing layer, and it is a product that translates directly to Latin American wealth platforms that already distribute tokenised US assets.

Matters, a Stockholm neobank founded this year, raised a US$5m pre-seed for a subscription banking service that uses AI to steer spending and saving.

The round was led by Jakob Johansson with a group of Nordic angels.

Subscription rather than interchange is an unusual consumer-banking model and one worth watching as a template for markets where interchange is capped.

Stand raised a US$70m Series C at a US$1bn valuation to insure homes in catastrophe-exposed regions.

Saga Ventures led, joined by Lowercarbon, Eclipse, Equal Ventures, Inspired Capital, Neotribe and Jackson Square Ventures; the three-year-old San Francisco company, which simulates wildfire and wind risk to underwrite and harden properties, has now raised US$130m.

Climate-adjusted underwriting is attracting growth capital at the same time as traditional carriers retreat from exposed markets, a dynamic that applies to flood and hurricane risk across the Caribbean, Mexico and Brazil.

Estuary Biotherapeutics raised US$103m in seed and Series A funding led by RA Capital Management for kidney-targeted gene therapies.

Deep Track Capital, Biogen New Ventures, UPMC Enterprises, Pivotal bioVenture Partners and the National Kidney Foundation Innovation Fund joined existing backers 4BIO Capital and GV.

It is one of the largest Series A rounds of the year in biotech and a signal that crossover investors are back in early-stage therapeutics.

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Harvard's endowment returned 27.1% in the fiscal year and rose to nearly US$68bn, with venture capital a key contributor.

The result comfortably beat the S&P 500 and reads as a vindication of the Yale model after several years of doubt, although most of the money is restricted, legal fees ran to about US$210m and the university has cut jobs; it also disclosed a multibillion-dollar position in SpaceX.

A strong venture mark at the world's largest endowment helps the asset class with LPs who had been reducing allocations.

City Therapeutics raised US$200m in a Nasdaq IPO and closed its first session up 28%, while AI drug developer Iambic Therapeutics finished its debut up more than 18%.

City priced 11.1 million shares at US$18 and had raised about US$239m privately from ARCH Venture Partners, Viking Global, Sofinnova, Fidelity, Invus, Regeneron Ventures and AN Ventures.

Two well-received biotech listings in a week keep the IPO window open for venture-backed issuers ahead of a possible Anthropic filing.

Aldaron, a new private equity firm that uses AI to lift portfolio-company revenue, raised US$885m for its debut fund.

Separately, Boston life-sciences investor Longwood Fund is targeting US$150m for its seventh fund and Catalio Capital is raising US$500m for its fifth Nexus fund.

A first-time fund closing near US$1bn on an AI operating thesis shows where LP appetite sits in late 2026.

Rabot Energy raised a US$56m Series B co-led by Endeit and DeepTech & Climate Fund to turn German homes into virtual power plants.

The Hamburg company sells dynamic electricity tariffs and coordinates household batteries to store cheap renewable power; HV Capital, High-Tech Gründerfonds, Bosch Ventures and Acurio Ventures also participated.

Distributed storage orchestration is a model that maps onto Chile's and Brazil's rapidly growing rooftop solar bases.

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Replit chief executive Amjad Masad said at TechCrunch Disrupt that the company is no longer working with Anthropic, claiming OpenAI's Sol and Astra models now outperform Claude on its benchmarks.

People familiar with the relationship disputed that the partnership had ended.

Model-switching by a flagship coding customer is the clearest evidence yet that application-layer loyalty to any single lab is thin.

RapidCanvas raised a US$29m Series B led by Vertex Ventures SEA & India to pair software with dedicated engineers for custom enterprise AI applications.

Hitachi Ventures joined existing investors Accel, Peak XV Partners, Valley Capital Partners and Titanium Ventures, taking total funding to US$52.5m.

The services-plus-software model is proving fundable at Series B, a relevant precedent for Latin American AI implementers selling to banks and retailers.

Agent-testing and agent-run services drew a cluster of early rounds: Shamrock AI raised US$5m from Endiya Partners and Capria Ventures to validate AI agents in critical enterprise processes, and Solvera raised a US$6.3m pre-seed led by Seedcamp for engineering services delivered by supervised agents.

Shamrock is based in Shillong, India, and Solvera in Oslo.

As agents move into production, the tooling that audits and supervises them is becoming its own seed category.

Mueon, a Portland semiconductor-systems startup, raised a US$65m Series A led by Maverick Silicon, with Intel Capital, IQT, M-Ventures and Oregon Venture Fund.

Chip rounds of this size at Series A continued even as listed chipmakers posted their worst losing streak since 2008.