LatAm fundraising & M&A
10 items
ScanntechRound BrazilScanntech raised a US$180m Series F co-led by L Catterton and Partners Group, the largest Latin American round of the week.
Bradesco and SPX joined existing backers Warburg Pincus, Hindiana, IFC and Endeavor in the São Paulo retail-data company. Global private equity will still pay growth-stage prices for proprietary Latin American datasets with recurring revenue.
Televisa and David Martínez's investment firm agreed to buy AT&T México for US$2bn.
The deal folds Mexico's third mobile operator into a Televisa-led group in a market long dominated by América Movil; carrier consolidation changes distribution for every Mexican fintech and consumer app that relies on telco channels.
NubankM&A Brazil United Kingdom United StatesNubank walked away from Monzo after the UK neobank held out for £10bn.
The Brazilian bank, valued at roughly US$65bn, said it would concentrate on its home market and the US, while Monzo opened early talks with CVC and Advent International about selling a stake of up to 15%.
Endeavor CatalystFund Brazil Mexico ArgentinaEndeavor Catalyst closed an oversubscribed US$320m Fund V, above its US$300m target, with Itaú Ventures among the LPs.
Three more vehicles went to market: Chile's Fen Ventures is targeting US$30–50m for an AI-leaning Fund IV, Vox Capital wants BRL200m for its fourth impact fund and The Yield Lab Latam launched RAIZ, a BRL200m Brazil-only agtech fund.
AsaasDebt BrazilAsaas and Wellhub expanded receivables-backed credit vehicles in Brazil.
SME payments platform Asaas raised roughly US$55.6m through its third FIDC to fund receivables advances, and Wellhub added BRL100m to the Galapagos Capital-managed FIDC that finances its partner gyms. Brazilian securitisation keeps letting software companies scale credit without diluting equity.
PayJoy acquired Mexican fintech Finia to deepen its credit underwriting; terms were not disclosed.
The device-financing lender is buying underwriting capability rather than distribution, a sign of where value sits in Mexican consumer credit.
Tether backed EFY Finance's seed round to push institutional stablecoin use across Latin America.
EFY settles into local bank accounts in 17 countries and serves more than 25,000 active accounts; the amount was not disclosed.
Two Brazilian services and industrial businesses found foreign buyers.
Vela LatAm, controlled by Constellation Software, is acquiring IT and cybersecurity services firm Penso, pending Cade approval, and European private-equity firm Archimed agreed to buy Genetica, a provider of bio-based wastewater treatment, biogas and crop protection; neither price was disclosed.
Latin American founders kept raising through US-domiciled vehicles, led by Flai's US$27m Series A from Base10 Partners.
Flai, a dealership-automation AI platform co-founded by three Uruguayans, was joined by Monashees' undisclosed seed in Colombian-founded Skalar, Hi Ventures' US$6m for Konko AI and Chingona Ventures' US$6m for Dapta. The Delaware-topco model is now the default for the region's AI startups.
Seed capital reached deep-tech and consumer companies in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.
Buenos Aires biotech Giraffe Bio raised US$6.4m led by Orion Industrial Ventures with BHP Ventures and Twynaz to recover critical minerals; Uruguay's car-rental platform TripWip raised US$4.2m from Latin Leap, CrossBoundary and Yango Ventures; and Chile's Neocrop Technologies raised US$2.75m led by Zentynel Frontier Investments to commercialise gene-edited wheat.
The week in numbers, from the desk's deal log: 13 deals logged, US$2,274m of disclosed capital (US$2,000m of it the AT&T México sale), Brazil the most active country with six deals and fintech the most active vertical with four.
Latin America — the week
6 itemsEndeavorMarkets Mexico Brazil ColombiaLatin American startups raised US$4.7bn in 2025, up 65% and the most since 2022, with Mexico and Brazil taking 81% of the total.
Endeavor and Glisco Partners put the average round at US$8.5m, against US$6.6m in 2024. The recovery is real but narrow: funds without a Mexico or Brazil franchise are competing for the remaining 19%.
NubankPolicy BrazilBrazil's household debt has become an election issue with the 25 October runoff days away.
A record 82% of households carry debt and a third are in arrears, and both Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro have floated tighter rules on credit offers; Nubank's 90-day-plus delinquency of 6.9% sits well below the neobank average.
A hot US inflation print sent the Mexican peso to the bottom of the FX table before regional currencies recovered later in the week.
The dollar reached its strongest since May 2025, JPMorgan revised its regional strategy to anticipate a strong rebound in Brazil while downgrading Chile, and copper's record run is read as a windfall for Chile and Peru.
Argentina's central bank kept its ban on banks offering crypto services as Caputo forecast a solid recovery.
The 2022 prohibition will not change this year; Argentina posted the region's second-highest monthly inflation after Venezuela, and the economy minister ruled out recession and discussed expanded World Bank funding.
Colombia's unemployment hit a two-year high as the IMF called its fiscal position unsustainable.
The country lost 686,000 jobs in August and the Fund does not rule out financing Colombia.
BTG PactualPolicy Peru Brazil ColombiaBTG Pactual obtained a licence to operate as a bank in Peru with US$100m of initial capital, as Millicom plans a regional platform centred on Colombia.
BTG adds a fully licensed entity in Lima, and Millicom's CEO said integrating the Movistar assets gives Tigo's parent the scale to fund infrastructure neither company could carry alone.
Fintech & payments
4 items
RampRound United StatesRamp raised US$1.85bn at a US$60bn valuation, co-led by Dragoneer, Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Sands Capital and Avenir Growth.
The round comes four months after a US$750m raise at US$44bn, as Ramp expands from expense management into procurement and accounting. The premium will set expectations for Latin American corporate-card players.
RainPolicy United States VenezuelaRain and Modern Treasury filed for national trust bank charters as the ICBA sued the OCC over them.
Rain, behind roughly 75% of tracked stablecoin card volume, applied to custody assets and issue its own stablecoin; its shuttered Venezuela-linked Kontigo card programme is an AML history the comment period will test.
Mastercard United States EuropeStablecoins moved to scheme level as Mastercard and BVNK launched a single fiat-plus-stablecoin platform and BNY ran the first tokenised-Treasury repo.
The Mastercard Global Money Platform offers one API for fiat and stablecoin accounts, cards and local payouts and Circle's USDC became the first "significant" e-money token under MiCA. For LatAm fintechs, stablecoin rails are becoming a scheme product rather than a crypto-native workaround.
JPMorgan ChasePolicy United States BrazilBanks and networks drew the lines on agent access to accounts.
JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon said external AI agents will be blocked from customer accounts, American Express published an Intent Intelligence framework that authenticates a customer's instructions before an agent transacts. Brazil, where Global Payments says 72% of consumers would delegate purchases to agents, is the test market.
Venture & markets
3 items
AnthropicIPO United StatesAnthropic showed prospective IPO investors third-quarter revenue of US$16.8bn, up 45% quarter on quarter, with a listing possible as soon as next month.
Reports put the raise at more than US$100bn at a US$2tn valuation. A listing of that size would reset comparables for every AI-exposed growth round, including in Latin America.
CoreWeaveMarkets United StatesThe AI trade wobbled as CoreWeave's bonds sold off to yields above 15% and chipmakers posted eight straight down sessions, the worst run since 2008.
A reported CXMT memory breakthrough triggered a chip selloff, CoreWeave shares fell 16% and Fed chair Warsh's silence cut implied odds of an October hike to under 15%. The debt financing of AI infrastructure is where stress is surfacing first.
Varonis SystemsM&A United StatesProofpoint agreed to buy Varonis Systems for US$6.3bn in cash, the largest cybersecurity deal of 2026.
The same week Intuit agreed to buy billing fintech Sequence for about US$200m, roughly 5x its invested capital, and Bumble agreed to go private with Ithaca Holdings for US$1.3bn.
AI & technology
2 items
Meta United StatesMeta released Muse Wonder and Wonder Full, then an 816B-parameter open-weight Muse Spark Open tuned with Apple.
Wonder Full ranks second only to Claude Opus 5.5 on Artificial Analysis. A credible third frontier lab with billions of users changes the pricing calculus for every application company.
OpenAIMarkets United StatesOpenAI's annualised revenue was about US$50bn at end-September, some US$20bn below the widely reported figure, as it opened talks on a roughly US$30bn round.
Separately, the FBI arrested an OpenAI engineer accused of planting a recording device in an executive meeting room, and Replit said it has stopped working with Anthropic, which people familiar with the relationship disputed.
Worth reading
3 itemsFinance is entering its mod era.
Simon Taylor on why agents will remix financial products the way players modded Counter-Strike, and why know-your-agent will have to be linked to know-your-customer.
Elena Verna on why nobody can tell what US$20 of AI software actually buys.
A teardown of credit, token and seat pricing models from Lovable's head of growth.
Marc Rubinstein on training four AI agents to parse 250 pages of US bank earnings in a week.
Why earnings releases drive 15% of annual share-price variance.