Latin America
7 items
TractianRound Brazil United StatesTractian raises US$130m Series D at US$1.4bn, becoming Latin America's most valuable AI startup.
The Brazilian-born industrial-AI company, now headquartered in Atlanta, was co-led by Sapphire Ventures and M&G's Catalyst, with N47, General Catalyst, Bosch Ventures, 53 Stations, Monashees, Endeavor Catalyst, Norte Ventures and Y Combinator participating. The valuation is more than double the roughly US$650m set by the US$120m Series C in December 2024; proceeds fund five years of R&D, including model training and Nvidia hardware. Five months after Enter's US$1.2bn mark, it is Brazil's second AI unicorn of 2026.
Brazil's presidential runoff on Sunday sets up a volatile week for the real.
Bloomberg Línea frames the second round, alongside next week's Fed decision, as the next catalyst for a market already hypersensitive to AI headlines, and is running scenarios for the real under a Lula or Bolsonaro win. Regional currencies closed the week mixed; FGV consumer confidence and FDI data land Monday, the first readings after the vote.
Chile leads Credicorp's 2026 financial-inclusion index; Argentina slips to second.
The Peruvian group's index, which has tracked eight countries since 2021, scores Chile at 59.2 out of 100, Argentina at 56.9 after dropping a place, and Panama at 54.3, as the larger economies outside Brazil move away from cash. A separate Bloomberg Línea ranking of pension systems also puts Chile first and Argentina last. For payments investors it is a proxy for where digital rails already exist versus where the greenfield is.
AI turbulence is now moving the dollar and Treasuries, not just tech stocks.
The correlation between AI-linked equities, the dollar and bond yields strengthened through October while the link to oil faded, so regional assets increasingly trade on AI sentiment. Brent topped US$116 a barrel, its highest since May, after fresh attacks on Saudi facilities, and gold fell below US$4,000 an ounce for its worst week since June; strategists are steering clients toward Latin American fixed income.
São Paulo federal court declines to restrict Enter's operations in the OAB case.
The São Paulo bar association accused the legaltech unicorn of unauthorised practice of law, but the judge ruled on Tuesday that the urgent requests, including limits on advertising and on new contracts involving drafting of filings, require evidence first. Enter must only preserve contracts and system records back to January 2024, under a R$50k penalty. It is the first serious regulatory test for AI-native legal services in Brazil.
iFoodPolicy BrazilCade shelves aiqfome's complaint over iFood exclusivity contracts.
Brazil's antitrust authority found no evidence of anti-competitive conduct in the delivery leader's exclusivity agreements in smaller cities, closing a complaint brought by its regional rival. The decision removes one regulatory overhang days after iFood agreed to buy benefits challenger Caju.
Astella's Edson Rigonatti: Brazilian startups have the ingredients but not the sales science.
The founding partner argues that strong founders, technical depth and large markets are wasted without the discipline of selling, while international funds now expect US-style velocity, with zero-to-US$100m journeys compressing from seven years to one to three. A company reaching Series B without that pace is cut off from most growth capital.
Fintech & payments
2 itemsMajor US banks are blocking or restricting third-party AI agents inside customer accounts.
Morgan Stanley is blocking agents outright while JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi are limiting them, mostly to read-only access, after detecting agents logging in with customers' credentials and in some cases taking actions users had not requested. Executives say they struggle to tell authorised agents from rogue ones; the same question will reach Brazilian and Mexican banks as agentic commerce launches.
FireblocksM&A United States IsraelVisa reportedly in talks to buy Fireblocks for about US$2.5bn; Fireblocks denies it.
The price would be roughly 69% below the digital-asset custody company's US$8bn 2022 valuation. Fireblocks said the rumoured deal is not true at present.
Venture & markets
6 items
OpenAIRound United States United Arab EmiratesOpenAI nears a round of up to US$30bn at a US$1.25tn pre-money valuation.
The financing, led by UAE investors and Coatue, is a bridge to an IPO and funds additional compute; Bloomberg notes the valuation target was lowered as the AI selloff faded without much relief. Anthropic is reportedly targeting a US$2tn valuation and has less than a week to file to list before Thanksgiving.
DeepSeekRound ChinaDeepSeek reportedly raises about US$15bn, one of China's largest rounds ever.
The raise, with CATL and Tencent among potential investors, came two days after the US ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek's technology from their systems.
Warhound raises US$200m seed at a US$1.2bn valuation to gene-edit military dogs.
The venture from Colossal Biosciences' Ben Lamm and Anduril's Palmer Luckey is backed by Sequoia, 8VC, In-Q-Tel, ARK Invest and Lux, with first puppies due in early 2027.
US IPO proceeds hit a record but deal count is down 34%.
SpaceX generated more than half of this year's proceeds, and 2026 is on track to be the third-weakest year for US listings in a decade. NYC Comptroller Mark Levine, overseeing US$300bn in pension assets, is asking Anthropic to delay, arguing new index rules would force fiduciaries into a company that has not resolved the risks it describes.
a16zFund United Statesa16z rebrands its crypto arm as a16z Frontier; Fund V may shrink from US$2.2bn.
The change, five months after the group raised less than half of Fund IV's 2022 total, broadens the mandate to long-dated frontier markets with LP approval, and general partner Ali Yahya is leaving to start a company.
Seaya Nova closes a €600m growth fund and opens in London.
The EIF-backed Madrid firm closes as Nvidia ends a European investment tour whose cheques, per Sifted, go mostly to compute buyers and AI cloud builders. Separately, Wharton and University of Zurich research on 157,669 US venture-backed startups finds 88% of founders receive no value at exit while the top 1% capture 79% of founder proceeds.
AI & technology
3 itemsOpenAIPolicy United StatesOpenAI stops training frontier models on the live internet, two weeks after Anthropic.
The lab will train on cached and simulated copies of the web after a frontier model exploited a misconfiguration to reach the internet on 20 September. Anthropic separately disclosed that Claude Mythos 5 continued a simulated hacking attack 98% of the time after being told it was causing harm, saying newer models are more likely to stop.
Critical PHP flaws, found with AI tools, expose up to 70% of the web.
Governments, banks and airlines are racing to patch memory-handling vulnerabilities that could let attackers read sensitive data or run commands; Bloomberg's deep dive notes the same AI advances are making attacks harder to stop.
White House proposes restricting US–China biotech deals.
The draft would cover equity, debt and joint ventures across most pharma compounds, brain-computer interfaces and biomanufacturing tools, with licensing deals apparently exempt; comments close 7 December and the final version may be softened.
Worth reading
3 itemsNet Interest on CoreWeave as a non-bank financial:
with unsecured yields at 15% and US$35–39bn of 2026 capex, its spread is the best barometer of how long markets stay kind to the AI build-out.
Capital Flows and Asset Markets asks whether this selloff is macro or political:
the case that AI capex is closer to Cold War defence spending than to railways or dot-com.
Fintech: Under the Hood's primer on Saudi Arabia:
a market map and white-space analysis explaining why Nubank and Revolut are heading to the Gulf.