Dealflow.la #19 - Bolsonaro 🇧🇷 to skip Lula 🇧🇷 inauguration in favor of Miami 🇺🇸 vacation, Russian tourists 🇷🇺 in Venezuela 🇻🇪, & Uruguay 🇺🇾 rebuffs MERCOSUR.

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Dec 30, 2022

Funding

Expediente Azul 🇲🇽 raised $38,000 from StartUp Perú 🇵🇪 to allow financial institutions to scale their sales by automatically gathering all requisites from a customer.

Platta 🇧🇷 raised a $100,000 Seed round led by Granto Seguros 🇧🇷 to democratize access to investment worlds through their equity crowdfunding platform intended. The company's platform allows access to pre-analyzed innovative businesses and startups with great potential, helping investors to diversify their portfolios by connecting them to startups and other investors.

Feel 🇧🇷 raised a $140,000 Pre-Seed Round led by Sororité 🇧🇷 to offer self-care and intimate well-being for women. The company uses dermatologically and gynecologically tested raw materials to provide natural, vegan and healthy lubrication products that enhance health and also pleasure, enabling women to embrace intimacy without guilt or shame and get access to products that contribute to their health and pleasure.

Comsentimento 🇧🇷 raised a $300,000 Pre-Seed round led by Incubate Fund 🇯🇵 to improve treatment and accelerate research against cancer through their AI-based data transformation, research, and clinical data platform. The company offers digital health provisions for healthcare treatment services through data utilization to produce knowledge about the human body, diseases, and treatments, enabling healthcare clinics, professionals, and physicians to facilitate access to information for a careful and humanized service.

Sonica 🇧🇷 raised a $380,000 Seed round led by Invisto 🇧🇷 to create complete Web3 projects with their no-code platform. The company's platform allows the creation of a web3 page with web2 UX integrated that can be used for crypto and blockchain trading on a private wallet, allowing businesses to create a platform to function with the asset, token and NFT generation and distribution, including marketplace configuration and metadata.

100 Foods 🇧🇷 raised a $750,000 Venture round with funding from Futurum Capital 🇧🇷 to offer packaged vegan food. The company's product includes ketchup, mustard sauces, seasoning mix, and mayonnaise which are free of sugar, sodium, preservatives, and artificial colors, enabling consumers to buy healthy ready-made plant-based products to be used in a variety of dishes.

Jusfy 🇧🇷 raised a $1.3 Million Seed round led by SaaSholic 🇧🇷, with funding from Norte Ventures 🇧🇷 and Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Brazil 🇧🇷 to offer legal services and consulting for individuals and business organizations.

Cash.in 🇧🇷 raised a $1.3 Million Venture round led by Bertha Capital 🇧🇷 to develop a payments platform intended to simplify payments for its clients. The company's platform facilitates an efficient way to distribute incentive premiums, pay outsourced employees, and other intra-company payments such as refunds, food, fuel, and others, helping clients to save time in managing payments and increase productivity.

Scaleup 🇧🇷 raised a $1.3 Million Venture Round led by BR Angels 🇧🇷 to offer an e-learning experience to aid schools and other educators to deliver educational content through its platform.

Paketá Crédito 🇧🇷 raised $57 Million in Debt Financing from Milenio Capital 🇧🇷 to continue offering credit payroll for employees of companies through their online payroll loan platform. The company's platform facilitates the work by providing a simple and functional tool that accelerates employees' dreams through payroll loans and financial education content through a fully digital environment, enabling clients to manage the payroll loan benefit easily.

Santa 🎅 raised a $100 Trillion Series Z round led by North Pole Ventures 🧊 to expedite once-a-year same-day present delivery across urban Latin America. The funding is also being used to digitize the intake of Christmas lists in hundreds of languages and to facilitate the go-to-market function of Santa’s reindeer-as-a-service software.

Sociopolitical News

🇦🇷 Argentina

Argentina’s dramatic World Cup win last weekend not only gave the country a long-sought third title but also opened a period of rare widespread euphoria that could translate into positive expectations for a crisis-prone economy. (Bloomberg)
Qatar University has announced that the hotel room of Argentina captain and World Cup winner Lionel Messi will be turned into a mini museum. (Goal.com)

🇧🇴 Bolivia

Violent protests have broken out in Bolivia following the arrest of a powerful opposition politician. Luis Fernando Camacho, the right-wing governor of Santa Cruz province, was detained by armed police on Wednesday in an operation that his supporters said resembled "a kidnapping." (BBC)

🇧🇷 Brazil

Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro seems poised to skip the inauguration of his successor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Jan. 1, shunning a traditional power handover ceremony in Brasilia to spend New Year’s Eve celebrations in Miami. (Bloomberg)
Brazil has woken up to its first day without footballing legend Pelé. "The King", who won three World Cups and was widely considered the greatest footballer of all time, died at 82 in São Paulo on Thursday. Overnight, Pelé's face shone on buildings across the South American nation, and landmarks were lit up in his memory. Fans took to the streets dressed in his iconic number 10 shirt. (BBC)

🇨🇴 Colombia

The armed forces of Colombia and Ecuador on Wednesday signed an agreement to implement a plan to contain drug trafficking and organized crime on their shared border, authorities in both countries said. Colombia and Ecuador share a porous border that stretches some 586 kilometers and where criminal gangs and illegal armed groups engage in smuggling and drug trafficking. (Reuters)

🇩🇴 Dominican Republic

A court in the Dominican Republic on Monday convicted 10 of the 13 people accused of attempting to murder former Major League Baseball star David "Big Papi" Ortiz in Santo Domingo on June 9, 2019. (ESPN)

🇸🇻 El Salvador

Nine months into a state of emergency declared by President Nayib Bukele to fight street gangs, El Salvador has seen more than 1,000 documented human rights abuses and about 90 deaths of prisoners in custody. And Bukele’s popularity ratings have soared. (AP/Yahoo)

🇲🇽 Mexico

Earlier this month, Yasmín Esquivel Mossa, a Mexican Supreme Court justice, announced she was putting herself in the running to become the first woman to lead the court in its 198-year history. Now her bid may be in jeopardy. Last week a faculty member at Esquivel’s alma mater accused her of plagiarizing her 1987 undergraduate thesis, which she had to complete to receive her law degree. The scandal has ensnared two of Mexico’s most prestigious public institutions — the Supreme Court and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, known as UNAM — and laid bare the country’s polarized political climate. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who nominated Esquivel to the court in 2019, has downplayed the accusation by calling it an attack by conservatives who oppose his agenda. (LA Times)

🇵🇪 Peru

An estimated 22 people have been killed in clashes during the protests and another six have died in traffic accidents related to street blockades, according to government data. "We're going to give all the resources possible to the prosecutor's office to investigate the deaths," Boluarte said at a news conference on Thursday. Boluarte assumed the presidency earlier this month after leftist President Pedro Castillo was ousted in an impeachment vote hours after attempting to illegally dissolve Congress. She was previously Castillo's vice president. Castillo was arrested and remains in pretrial detention while under investigation on rebellion and conspiracy charges. His ouster led to days of sometimes violent protests in Peru. (Reuters)
Peru’s highest court has upheld a decision to hold former President Pedro Castillo in pre-trial detention for 18 months as he is investigated on charges of rebellion. The appeals chamber of Peru’s Supreme Court announced the decision on Thursday as the country continues to face unrest over the impeachment and removal of the former president who attempted to illegally dissolve Congress earlier this month. Castillo denied committing the crimes of rebellion and conspiracy in a hearing on Wednesday, stating that his pre-trial detention had “only served to polarise our country”. The legal process, he added, was “nothing more than political revenge”. (Al Jazeera)
The former Peruvian president Pedro Castillo, who is being held in pretrial detention after attempting to illegally dissolve Congress, said he was a victim of “political revenge” by his adversaries. (The Guardian)
Peru's finance minister on Thursday announced a $1.55 billion plan to revive the economy, impacted by weeks of protests following the ouster of former President Pedro Castillo. Alex Contreras said the package, costing 5.9 billion soles and to be financed with extra tax income and funds left over from the 2022 budget, will target regions most affected by the unrest and roadblocks. It will create an estimated 130,000 jobs over the next 12 months and help raise economic growth to 3% in the next quarter, he said. (Reuters)
Peru has detained six people, including three police generals, as part of an ongoing probe into accusations of corruption against former President Pedro Castillo, who was impeached and removed from office earlier this month. An anticorruption task force in the attorney general’s office said on Monday that it carried out a “mega-operation” as part of its investigation into allegations that Castillo’s government authorized “irregular promotions” for police and military officers. (Al Jazeera)

🇵🇷 Puerto Rico

Mayor Adams announces donation of sanitation collection trucks to assist Puerto Rico’s recovery from Hurricane Fiona. (nyc.gov)
He might fill stadiums and have the biggest songs in the world, but Bad Bunny will always show love to his beloved Puerto Rico. On Tuesday, the reggaetón superstar returned to his native island to host a gift giveaway with his Good Bunny Foundation and ended the night by throwing a surprise concert from on top of a gas station. (Rolling Stone)

🇺🇾 Uruguay

Presidential summit meetings of the Mercosur alliance were usually sedate comfortable affairs until Uruguay decided to “open up to the world” under its pro-business President Luis Lacalle Pou. Hard at work negotiating new trade deals outside the regional bloc since taking office in March 2020, Lacalle Pou’s ambitions (propped by China) are running up against the other Mercosur members who are closing ranks on Uruguay, as political alliances shift. Those tensions were on display at the Mercosur summit in Montevideo in December. There were accusations of foul play and unsportsmanlike tactics on news that Uruguay had independently applied to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership days previously, an 11-member trade alliance including Australia and Japan. This followed separate bilateral trade talks with China and Turkey earlier this year. “Uruguay needs to choose if it is with Mercosur,” Argentina’s foreign minister, Santiago Cafiero, insisted on the sidelines of the summit earlier this month, in which Uruguay transferred the Mercosur chair to Argentina for the next six months. (MP)
Uruguay’s President Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou has formally approved the installation of Google's new Firmina submarine cable in the country. Named after Brazilian slavery abolitionist and author Maria Firmina dos Reis, Firmina is Google’s second proprietary continental submarine cable in Latin America – that is, for its exclusive use – and will connect the US east coast to Las Toninas in Argentina, with landing points in Praia Grande in Brazil and Punta del Este in Uruguay. (BNA)

🇻🇪 Venezuela

Spain appoints new ambassador to Venezuela as relations thaw. Madrid sends new envoy to Caracas after a two year-hiatus over controversial 2018 presidential election. (Al Jazeera)
Years of political and economic turmoil in Venezuela have frightened off most tourists, with western nations advising citizens not to travel there. But for Russians seeking sun-soaked holidays, while faced with visa and flight restrictions because of the Ukraine invasion, Venezuela’s Isla de Margarita is proving a friendly destination. (The Guardian)

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