Dealflow.la #7 - Nubank 🇧🇷 delists from São Paulo Stock Exchange, Colombia 🇨🇴 negotiates with insurgents, DR 🇩🇴 to build border wall, and AMLO 🇲🇽 spys on press with Pegasus.
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Funding
Civi App 🇧🇷 raised a $1.75 Million Pre-Seed Round from Canary 🇧🇷 and Chromo Invest 🇧🇷 to build a security application that provides access to real time security alerts and news information for avoiding risky situations. (Think ‘Citizen’ app, but for Brazil.)
Prestamype 🇵🇪 raised $2.8 Million from the Inter-American Development Bank's Innovation Lab 🌎 and Salkantay 🇵🇪 to build out their SME lending services.
Amicci 🇧🇷 raised a $7.725 Million Series A Round led by Astella 🇧🇷 with funding from DGF Investmentos 🇧🇷, and Scale-Up Ventures 🇧🇷 to provide services to retail and industry to generate better sales, profits, and consumer loyalty.
Ali Credito 🇧🇷 raised a $25 Million Series A Round lead by BoostLab 🇧🇷 to provide payroll loan credit and solar financing credit.
BHub.com 🇧🇷 raised a $32.6 Million Series A Round from Valor Capital Group 🇺🇸, Scale-Up Ventures 🇧🇷, Picus 🇩🇪, Notre Ventures 🇧🇷, Moore Capital 🇺🇸, and Monashees 🇧🇷 to provide back-office SaaS (accounting/finance) for startups & SMEs in LatAm.
Cortex 🇧🇷 raised a $50 Million Series C Round from Softbank 🇯🇵, Riverwood Capital 🇺🇸, and Lightrock 🇬🇧 to allow marketing and sales teams to easily produce actionable analysis on demand.
Post-IPO Activity
Nubank 🇧🇷 has announced it will leave the São Paulo Stock Exchange. In November 2021, Nubank’s IPO listed their stock on both the NYSE and SPSE. According to the company, consolidating to a single listing on the New York Stock Exchange will reduce unnecessary redundancies and duplicate workloads and maximize efficiency.
Vitru 🇧🇷 raised a $58 Million Post-IPO Equity Round from Crescera Investimentos 🇧🇷 to continue providing online and tutored post-secondary education services for Brazilians.
Sociopolitical News
🇦🇷 Argentina
Fernandez upgrades Falklands strategic position; promises to reinforce military presence in southern Argentina. (MercoPress)
For an additional perspective: Latin American countries support Argentina's Falklands' claim at UN Fourth Committee. (MeroPress)
Argentina's fintech unicorn Ualá will invest $150 million over the next 18 months to boost its digital banking business in Mexico and Colombia. (Reuters)
Argentina hikes interest rate by 550 basis points to 75% after inflation overshoots. (CNBC/Reuters)
Argentina announced measures aidmed at boosting technology exports to $10 Billion in 2023, as it seeks to support growth in the "knowledge economy." (Reuters)
🇧🇴 Bolivia
The Bolivian Senate approved five new oil exploration and exploitation contracts that could generate around $1.7 billion in revenue. (BNA)
Bolivia seeks to boost natural-gas exports by cutting local use. President Luis Arce issued a decree to rescrict domestic manufacturer’s use of the fuel by local manufacturers. This would allow the state-run energy company, Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos, to sell more of the fuel abroad. (Bloomberg)
🇧🇷 Brazil
Bolsonaro defys preelection polls as a divided Brazil heads to a presidential runoff. Official returns from Sunday's first round showed former two-term president Lula, with 48.4% compared to 43.2% for Bolsonaro. The remaining votes went to nine other candidates. (NPR)
Brazil's markets jump on strong showing by right-wing Bolsonaro. Brazil's benchmark ‘Bovespa’ stock index jumped over 5%. Brazil's currency, the real, rose nearly 5% against the dollar. (Axios)
Right-wing wins in Brazil's Congress show staying power of 'Bolsonarismo.' (Reuters)
Analysts think Bolsonaro's better-than-expected showing (some polls showed him trailing by more than a dozen percentage points) could force Lula to moderate some of his opposition to the deregulation and privatization programs Bolsonaro had pushed. (Axios)
🇨🇱 Chile
Chile's sliding peso reflects tough battle vs rampaging dollar. Chile's peso got a shot in the arm in July from a huge $25 billion central bank intervention. In recent months has been one of the region's worst performers, showing how hard the battle is for policy makers countering a rampaging dollar. (Reuters)
Scala Data Centers has been awarded an environmental license to build the largest data centre campus in Chile. Located in the Santiago metropolitan area, the campus will boast 120MW of total capacity delivering an initial of 30MW of capacity. Due to become operational in Q1 of 2024, Scala's new data centre has been developed to serve an unnamed hyperscale client. (CapacityMedia)
Hapag-Lloyd is set to rapidly expand its nascent terminal portfolio, agreeing to purchase Chilean operator SM SAAM’s ports and logistics subsidiaries in a deal valued at around $1bn. “Investing in terminal infrastructure is a key element of our strategic agenda, and Latin America is one of our stronghold markets,” said Hapag-Lloyd CEO Rolf Habben Jansen. (TheLoadStar)
🇨🇴 Colombia
Colombia will restart peace negotiations with National Liberation Army insurgent group. Venezuela is one of the guarantor countries in the negotiation process, which was launched over six years ago but halted in 2019 by former Colombian president Ivan Duque. Born as a Marxist insurgent force in the 1960s, the group finances its activities through kidnapping, extortion and involvement in the narcotics trade and has grown to one of the largest in the region. In recent years, the group has expanded operations in southern Venezuela, where it controls illegal mining operations. (CNN)
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday backed Colombia’s recent efforts to rethink its drug policy and said the Biden administration and Colombia’s newly elected government will work together on rural development programs and interdiction efforts, while sharing intelligence on drug trafficking groups. (AP)
Colombia’s Petro proposes a tax on landowners. Colombia should change its medium-term fiscal plan and tax landowners more so the government can buy millions of hectares of land for farmers as part of the implementation of a 2016 peace deal, President Gustavo Petro said. (Bloomberg)
Colombia’s urban development agency IDU is preparing the tender for the Calle 13 corridor, a $529 Million road project on the western edge of Bogotá. (BNA)
🇨🇷 Costa Rica
Costa Rica to suspend tariff benefits for Panamanian products amid trade dispute. (Reuters)
🇩🇴 Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is building a barrier to insulate one of the region’s most successful economies from the economic and sociopolitical chaos in Haiti. Haitians fleeing hunger and violence will soon be met with a 13-foot-tall border wall meant to keep them out of the neighboring Dominican Republic. The concrete and steel structure will stretch some 102 miles (164 kilometers) along the border of the Dominican Republic. The wall will be the 2nd largest in the Americas; only the US-Mexico border wall is longer. (Bloomberg)
🇪🇨 Ecuador
A clash between prisoners in one of Ecuador's largest jails has left at least 15 inmates dead. Ecuador has had a spate of deadly clashes between drugs gangs in prisons. More than 400 have died in those clashes since 2020. (BBC)
🇸🇻 El Salvador
Ex-El Salvador soccer chief sentenced to 16 months in FIFA corruption case. (Reuters)
More than 2,000 soldiers and police surrounded and closed off a town in El Salvador on Sunday in order to search for street gang members accused in a killing. The large-scale encirclement of the town of Comasagua is the latest example of heavy-handed tactics by the government to root out street gangs. Everyone entering or leaving the town was questioned or searched. Bukele requested Congress grant him extraordinary powers after gangs were blamed for 62 killings on March 26, and that decree has been renewed every month since then. It suspends some Constitutional rights and gives police more powers to arrest and hold suspects. (AP)
🇲🇽 Mexico
Mexico's president denies his government spied on journalists with Pegasus software. The cellphones of at least two Mexican journalists and a human rights defender were infected with the Pegasus software between 2019 and 2021; López Obrador’s term started in 2018. Several countries like Mexico and Saudi Arabia have used the software to target journalists, human rights defenders and health advocates. In 2017, the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab revealed the administration of former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto used the software to spy on the nation’s top journalists and activists. López Obrador was critical of former Peña Nieto's use of the spyware and has said on several occasions his government wouldn’t use it. (Axios)
Hack puts Latin American security agencies on edge because a massive trove of emails from Mexico’s Defense Department were among electronic communications taken by hackers from military and police security institutions in several Latin American countries. The 10 terabytes of data taken by the group also include emails from the militaries in El Salvador, Peru and Colombia, as well as El Salvador’s National Police. The Mexico portion of the data appeared to be the largest. (ABC)
🇳🇮 Nicaragua
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega escalates diplomatic crisis with US and Europe. In the past week, the Nicaraguan government has broken ties with the Netherlands, expelled the EU ambassador and announced it will not accept the United State’s new representative in the country. (El País)
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega calls Catholic Church a ‘dictatorship’ and describes priests as ‘killers’ and ‘coup plotters’ in a speech, accusing the clergy of working on behalf of ‘American imperialism.’ (Al Jazeera)
🇵🇾 Paraguay
Paraguay president asks Taiwan to invest $1 Billion to remain allies and ensure Asunción can resist pressure to switch its diplomatic ties to China. (The Guardian)
🇵🇪 Peru
Peru conservative businessman, Rafael Lopez Aliaga, is elected mayor of Lima. (Reuters)
🇻🇪 Venezuela
Venezuela frees seven jailed Americans in swap for two Maduro relatives. (Reuters)
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