Latin America
9 items
CajuM&A BraziliFood agrees to acquire Caju for about R$1bn in cash, creating a benefits business with 135,000 corporate clients and more than 3 million users.
The deal, which still needs clearance from Cade and the Banco Central, roughly doubles iFood's own benefits base and follows BTG Pactual's card launch, C6 Bank's purchase of Alymente and Flash's R$150m Series D since the PAT rule changes. Ticket, Alelo, Pluxee and VR still hold more than 80% of a R$150bn-a-year market.
Brazilian healthcare fintech Skedia raised US$12.5m within months of launch.
Its platform uses AI agents to automate stages of the clinic revenue cycle and already manages R$63m of clinical production across about 20 units; investors were not named.
Argentine paytech Rebill closed a US$5.4m pre-Series A, taking total funding past US$9m since 2020.
The company now operates in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and the US.
Tether led a pre-seed round in Bolivian fintech Peso, which builds stablecoin on- and off-ramps.
The funding supports expansion across Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina; Peso already lets Yango users in Bolivia pay for food in USD₮.
Citi expects Latin American growth to accelerate slightly from 1.9% in 2026 to 2.1% in 2027.
The bank's Economic Outlook argues the region can attract investment amid geopolitical tension, benefit from reconfigured global trade and lean on governments that appear more business-friendly.
The Mexican peso fell sharply after US–Mexico trade negotiations stalled over steel and aluminium tariffs.
Talks cooled after US officials, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, objected to Mexican demands for lower metal tariffs, dashing earlier optimism of a deal.
AT&T's US$2bn sale of its Mexican unit to Grupo Televisa and Fintech Holdings marks its full exit from Latin America.
A Bloomberg Línea column reads the 13 October deal, struck after a dozen years of trying to scale in Mexico, as a poor signal for the country's competitive environment and foreign investment appetite.
Nuvemshop Brazil Argentina MexicoNuvemshop opened its fourth Brazilian distribution centre, in Rio de Janeiro, while Mexico's Cubbo is also expanding fulfilment capacity in Brazil.
Nuvemshop, with 180,000 registered stores, wants to process 10% of Brazilian e-commerce within a decade; Cubbo has opened two DCs in 2026 and plans to move into warehouse technology and B2B logistics.
Nu México MexicoNu México launched Score Nu, a free monthly credit score from 0 to 1,000 with improvement tips.
Only 30% of surveyed customers knew which habits affect their credit evaluation, so the feature doubles as financial education and a lever for credit cross-sell in Nu's second market.
Fintech & payments
4 items
Paddle United Kingdom United StatesPaddle launched an AI Toolkit that lets developers configure and test billing from Claude Code, Cursor and Gemini CLI, and announced native usage-based billing for early 2027.
The merchant of record now covers more than 300 markets; the pitch is that AI-built companies need payments, tax and compliance inside the tools where they already work.
Standard Chartered signed definitive agreements to acquire Zodia Custody, and Ramp bought treasury platform Vesto.
The bank will fold Zodia's digital-asset custody into Securities Services, with the software arm moving to a new SC Ventures entity; Ramp's deal brings external bank accounts and Ramp Banking into one cash view.
Mynt, the Ant-backed owner of Philippine wallet GCash, raised US$841m in the country's largest-ever IPO at a US$7bn valuation.
Shares rose as much as 2.4% on debut in Manila, a useful comparable for emerging-market wallet listings.
US fintech rounds: Erebor, the Palmer Luckey-backed bank for defence and hard-tech companies, sold US$30m of shares to Robinhood's public VC fund; CapitalOS raised a US$21.9m Series A led by LGVP; VIVA Finance secured a US$150m credit facility from Viola Credit.
Robinhood's listed vehicle makes Erebor one of the first bank charters funded partly by retail-accessible venture capital.
Venture & markets
6 items
SpaceXM&A United StatesSpaceX and Tesla formed special committees of independent directors to study a merger that would combine about US$3.5tn of market value, the largest corporate tie-up ever.
Elon Musk called the idea one with "a lot of merit" but cautioned that a deal is not certain; Tesla's smaller Musk stake, Texas anti-takeover rules and scrutiny over Starlink access in Ukraine are the main obstacles.
AnthropicIPO United StatesA draft prospectus shows Anthropic's revenue rose to US$16.3bn in the first half of 2026 from US$1.1bn a year earlier, with nearly US$9bn spent on compute and more than US$600bn of future infrastructure commitments.
The filing also shows difficulty securing capacity from Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which increasingly treat it as a rival; Citadel's Ken Griffin said AI is "almost certainly" in a bubble ahead of an expected public filing.
Mega-rounds continued: Flapping Airplanes raised US$1bn at a US$6bn valuation co-led by Index and Lux; Legora raised a US$550m Series E at US$8.8bn led by Atreides; ASI raised US$325m at US$3bn led by Spark; Pigment raised US$250m at US$2.3bn led by the Scaleup Europe Fund.
Two of the four are European, with legal AI and enterprise planning drawing late-stage cheques alongside the model labs.
MetaMarkets United StatesMeta was ordered to pay US$25bn in New Mexico over privacy misrepresentations and will create a non-voting share class to fund its AI buildout.
Third-quarter revenue rose 26% to US$64bn while costs rose 68%; the judgment, which the state calls the largest of its kind, is almost certain to be appealed.
New funds: Inspired Capital closed a US$450m fourth fund, General Atlantic and the NFL's 32 Equity will raise a sports-focused growth fund, and Heights is raising a US$150m second fund.
The NFL vehicle gives the league a carry stream not shared with players.
Sifted's first Onstage demo day featured six physical-AI startups among 19 pitches, and Enact Intelligence raised a US$30m pre-seed, Switzerland's largest, backed by Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch.
Separately, a trio of H Company alumni including its former CTO is seeking US$30m for a new venture.
AI & technology
3 items
OpenAIPolicy United StatesSam Altman outlined three endgames for advanced AI governance to OpenAI staff: an IAEA-style international watchdog, a CERN-like consortium of labs, or a single dominant developer able to deny rivals compute.
He reportedly favours the first and called the third "terrible", saying OpenAI must choose a path within a year that includes a speed limit on self-improving systems.
Arda, founded by former OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew, emerged from stealth with a US$160m Series A at a US$1.5bn valuation co-led by Altimeter, Accel and Khosla.
Its agents turn product designs into factory assembly plans and update instructions as designs change.
AI models uncovered two roughly 20-year-old security flaws in PHP, which underpins about 70% of websites, and eight intermediate TLS certificates were found to have weak private keys.
The NSA is telling operators who cannot patch promptly to take sites offline, a concrete example of AI shifting the economics of vulnerability discovery.
Worth reading
3 itemsWhy one macro investor will not short AI despite the CoreWeave scare: a bear case needs falling demand meeting new supply, and neither is visible yet.
Capital Flows and Asset Markets
Juan Pablo Spinetto on what AT&T's retreat from Mexico says about the country's investment climate.
Bloomberg Línea
Netlify co-founder Chris Bach on storytelling and category creation, a 68-minute podcast conversation.
Startupeable