From Rappi's Roots to the Gulf

Hi, and welcome to a new edition of The Daily Dealflow — the 5-minute briefing that gives you clear context on capital flows and market-moving trends across the Americas, from Silicon Valley to Buenos Aires. Let's dive in.

🏆 Deal of the Day

Bogotá-founded payments-orchestration startup Yuno raised a $45M Series B led by Global PayTech Ventures, with a syndicate spanning Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Kaszek, Monashees, QuantumLight and Endeavor Catalyst — plus a notable Gulf contingent: Qatar's Rasmal Ventures, GrowthX Capital, and Abu Dhabi's sovereign-backed Further Ventures. The fresh Middle East capital arrives as Yuno names Doha its regional hub for the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, a market it's entering with a Saudi Central Bank payment-services certification already in hand plus live rails through Tap Payments and BNPL provider Tabby.

Why This? Yuno is a rare triple bridge: a Latin American company backed by top US funds that's now using Gulf capital to open a Middle East hub — turning a Bogotá-founded payments platform into a genuinely global infrastructure play spanning the Americas and the GCC in a single raise.

Positive Context:

• The round lands in the same week Mexico overtook Brazil in Q2 venture funding ($944M vs. $350M), signaling renewed institutional confidence in LatAm fintech even as the company's growth capital shifts toward the Gulf.
• The Middle East is now the world's fastest-growing real-time payments market, with regional transaction volume projected to climb from $675M in 2022 to $2.6B by 2027 — the exact corridor Yuno is betting its Doha hub on.

Yes, but:

• Payment orchestration is crowded on two fronts now — US-focused rivals at home, plus Checkout.com, Juspay and freshly-funded Primer competing for the same Gulf enterprise accounts.
• Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar are each building distinct real-time-payment rails and compliance regimes, which could strain Yuno's single-API pitch as GCC regulation keeps diverging.

Zoom in: Yuno's CEO Juan Pablo Ortega previously co-founded Rappi, LatAm's on-demand delivery unicorn, where he and Yuno's co-founder met while building out its payments team — meaning the same duo now bridging Bogotá to the Gulf first learned payments infrastructure inside a Colombian unicorn.

The signal: "Most companies raise a Series B to buy growth. We're raising ours to meet our customers' growth, and extend our lead, with a clear line to profitability in the year ahead," said Yuno co-founder and CEO Juan Pablo Ortega — GlobeNewswire.

💰 Venture Capital

SpaceX (US) on Friday completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, the largest acquisition ever of a VC-backed startup.

Palona AI (US) – Series A ($20M total funding), multimodal AI platform automating restaurant phone orders, POS routing and camera-based operations monitoring.

hiSofi (Uruguay/Brazil) – $1M, Seed (plus $250K co-investment from Uruguay's ANII), conversational AI debt-collection SaaS for fintechs – PulsoCapital.

Trajectory (US) – $40M, Series A ($55M total funding), continual-learning platform that post-trains enterprise AI agents from real-world user corrections.

Astute (US) - A B2B media platform, raised $1.2m in pre-seed funding from Flyer One Ventures, Silicon Gardens, Marathon Fund, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator.

Sonic Fire Tech (US) – $15M, Seed, sound and infrasound-based fire suppression technology – TechCrunch.

Vals AI (US), an AI evaluator, raised $40m in Series A funding. a16z led, joined by HRT Ventures, Next Ladder Ventures and insiders 8VC and Bloomberg Beta.

🏛️ Private Equity

Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) agreed to invest $1.5b into SB Energy, a Redwood City, Calif.-based data center infrastructure firm, as part of an Ohio project.

LearnVector (US) – $100M, strategic equity investment, AI-native learning company building agentic one-to-one tutoring that adapts lessons and assesses mastery.

TTM Technologies (US) – ~$1.1B, all-cash acquisition of Epiq Solutions from sponsor Veritas Capital, defense signal-intelligence and RF hardware maker – GlobeNewswire.

Global Infrastructure Partners (US) and I Squared Capital each submitted bids for Porto Sudeste, a Brazilian port being sold by Trafigura Group and Mubadala Capital, per Bloomberg.

Ecopetrol (Colombia) – ~$517M+ tranche settlement completing a controlling ~51% stake in Brava Energia, Brazilian offshore and onshore oil & gas producer – Valora Analítik.

Fenway Sports Group, whose backers include RedBird Capital Partners, agreed to sell around a one-third stake in Liverpool FC to a consortium that includes Amit Bhatia, Jeff Bezos, and Eduardo Saverin.

📈 Public & Capital Markets

General Atlantic (US) refreshed its confidential IPO paperwork with the SEC, nearly three years after the private equity firm's original submission, per the WSJ.

Alphabet (US) – Nasdaq: GOOGL, debut Australian-dollar bond issuance of roughly $3.6B across four tranches out to 20 years, funding AI infrastructure buildout – Bloomberg.

Meta dropped 3.54% ahead of a major trial over allegations that its platforms harmed children and teens.

Boeing declined 2.47% after the US Army temporarily grounded its fleet of Boeing-made Apache helicopters following a crash in Texas.

📅 ICYMI

Meta’s federal court case kicks off in California today. If the social media giant loses, it could be ordered to pay as much as $1.4 trillion in damages—which could be a serious problem for a company with a market cap of $1.44 trillion.

July produced 40 new unicorns, per Crunchbase data, the most prolific month in more than four years. The first half of 2026 saw more unicorns join the club than all of 2025.

UC Irvine researcher Gloria Mark has tracked how long people focus on one screen before switching since 2003: it averaged 2.5 minutes then and has fallen to about 47 seconds today – University of California.

A 2026 analysis of 231 million leaked passwords found 48% can be cracked in under a minute with a single consumer GPU, and 60% within an hour – Kaspersky Daily.

See you tomorrow,

Jose Kont
The human behind The Investor Society.

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