How Do You Get Picked By AI?

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

Profound, a two-year-old startup that helps brands get cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation in a round led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins — its second unicorn-making raise in under seven months – TechCrunch.

Why This?: As AI chatbots increasingly replace search engines as the first stop for consumers and B2B buyers, "getting found" by AI is becoming as critical — and as investable — a category as SEO once was, which is why marketers and VCs across the Americas are racing to back the infrastructure behind it.

Positive Context:

• Profound's revenue has tripled over the past six months and the platform now serves 2,500-plus brands, including a third of the Fortune 100 — Estée Lauder, Walmart, Zoom, Stripe, and Ramp among them.
• The round was led by two of venture's most selective firms, alongside Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and South Park Commons — a show of conviction that "generative engine optimization" is a durable new marketing budget line, not a passing fad.

Yes, but:

• The category is crowded and undefined, and the AI platforms themselves control the black-box algorithms Profound is trying to decode — either could commoditize the product or route around it entirely.
• A valuation that's climbed sharply in under seven months is a bet on a discipline barely two years old; if brands' AI-visibility budgets don't scale as fast as the multiple implies, later investors could end up overpaying for a trend.

Zoom in: Profound didn't start out as a marketing platform at all — it launched as an analytics tool, and only pivoted into a full-blown AI marketing platform as ChatGPT and its rivals began reshaping how consumers discover brands.

The comment: "To have two of the greatest venture firms in the world triple down on that ambition is an honor," said James Cadwallader, Profound's co-founder and CEO, in a company blog post – Profound.

💰 Venture Capital

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A5X (Brazil) – US$70M, Series D, a new derivatives exchange aiming to break B3’s monopoly with its own clearinghouse. Founded by Carlos Ferreira Filho, Karel Luketic, Nilson Monteiro, and Julian Chediak, it brought in Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Kaszek. Its launch slipped to Q2 2027: winning liquidity is the hard part – The Investor Society.

TypeSafe AI (US) – $40M, seed funding, San Francisco startup building "machine-native" AI models designed to make decisions for other software rather than chat with humans, emerging from stealth with a product called Jev that returns calibrated confidence scores at low latency. Founded by Diogo Almeida (formerly of OpenAI's ChatGPT team), Erik Gafni, and Sasha Sheng, the round was led by DCVC. The pitch, in the founders' own words: "AI built for software, not people" – FinSMEs.

Noetive (US) – $41M, seed funding, startup building what it calls an "intelligence of record" — self-improving AI meant to run physical-economy operations like manufacturing, logistics, energy grids, and data centers. Founded by CEO Amir Frenkel and a team pulled from Meta, Google, and Amazon, the round was led by Eclipse, with Craft Ventures, Westly Group, and Liquid 2 Ventures also participating. Its angel bench reads like a rival-CTO summit: Meta's Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, Airbnb's Ahmad Al-Dahle, and Nest co-founder Matt Rogers all wrote personal checks – Yahoo Finance.

Emilia AI (US/Colombia) – US$1.5M, pre-seed, software that turns restaurant cameras and point-of-sale data into agents that detect fraud and suggest upsells. Andrés Cajiao and Sebastian Rojo received US$1M from Prosus Ventures; iFood could become a major distribution shortcut. In one pilot, it promises an additional US$300 per table each month – The Investor Society.

Evvy (US) – $40M, Series B, at-home vaginal microbiome testing platform that uses clinical-grade DNA sequencing to help patients and doctors diagnose chronic infections standard tests miss, now used by more than 100,000 patients and 3,000 healthcare providers. Founded by CEO Priyanka Jain along with Laine Bruzek and Pita Navarro, the round was led by Catalio Capital Management. The company is pushing next into fertility and IVF research, alongside a new "EvvyAI" tool for real-time guidance – TechCrunch.

🏛️ Private Equity

OpenAI (US) – $300M+, acquisition, the ChatGPT maker bought Glass Imaging, a computer-vision startup whose neural networks sharpen smartphone photos at the moment of capture rather than through after-the-fact editing. Founded in 2019 by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop — both former Apple engineers who helped build the iPhone's original Portrait Mode — Glass Imaging had raised only about $30M before cashing out roughly 10x higher. The deal slots neatly alongside OpenAI's earlier $6.5B purchase of Jony Ive's device startup io, reinforcing that Sam Altman's company is building hardware, not just chatbots – TechCrunch.

DHL Supply Chain (Colombia) – undisclosed value, acquisition, the German logistics giant bought Open Market, one of Colombia's largest warehousing and distribution operators, with 21 warehouses, 120,000 square meters of space, and roughly 4,100 employees. The move targets DHL's push into life-sciences and healthcare logistics across Latin America, led regionally by CEO Agustín Croche — proof that the unglamorous business of pallets and cold storage remains one of the hottest corners of LatAm dealmaking – Portafolio.

CareTrust REIT (US) – $400M, sale-leaseback acquisition, the healthcare real estate investment trust bought a skilled-nursing portfolio of 2,622 beds across the Southwest and immediately leased it back to the existing operator at a stabilized yield of roughly 8.6%. It's the 24th deal CareTrust has closed in 2026 alone, pushing its year-to-date investment total to $1.9B — a reminder that nursing homes, unglamorous as they sound, have become one of the steadiest cash-flow trades in U.S. real estate – Business Wire.

LarrainVial (Chile) – undisclosed value, minority stake, Chile's largest wealth-management distributor took a passive stake in CIO Invest, an alternative-assets manager spun out of a family office in 2019, and will now distribute its funds across Latin America. CIO Invest's debut private-equity fund-of-funds, launched in 2025 to target the U.S. mid-market, has already pulled in $85M spread across 13 underlying funds — a small deal that quietly extends Chile's outsized influence over how the region invests abroad – Diario Financiero.

HCA Healthcare (US) – undisclosed value, acquisition, the hospital giant completed its purchase of the College of Health Care Professions, a Texas-based training school with 10 campuses, 8,000-plus annual students, and roughly 52,000 graduates since 1988. It's HCA doubling down on a workforce-pipeline strategy that already includes Galen College of Nursing — quietly solving its own staffing shortage by owning the schools that train its future employees – Business Wire.

📈 Public & Capital Markets

US stock movers (US) – earnings and AI-safety reaction, cybersecurity names CrowdStrike (+10.45%) and Palo Alto Networks (+8.97%) rallied on strong results even as J.B. Hunt Transport tumbled 12.64% on an earnings warning and Diamondback Energy fell 8% on geopolitical jitters, while Intel jumped 4.34% on reported SK Hynix partnership talks, macro/technology industry – TheStreet.

Bitcoin (US) – crypto market move, the largest cryptocurrency slipped roughly 1% to $76,921 on September 15 as traders de-risked ahead of the Fed's decision, leaving it down about a third from a year earlier but still up more than 22% over the prior month — and nowhere near its all-time high of $126,198 set back in October 2025, digital assets industry – Fortune.

📅 ICYMI

Anthropic uncovered a network of ~28 AI-powered dating apps, across which 4.7k+ fake personas exchanged 2.4m messages with 25k human users in just two weeks. The real users were charged real money for “coins” to keep their chats going with what they believed to be real women. As if dating isn't already hard enough.

Mark Zuckerberg says he’s more likely to side with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang over Anthropic’s Dario Amodei in the AI doomsday debate.

Daniel Humm, the chef behind New York City’s triple-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park, has a new venture that’s more accessible. The brand, Riff, will sell noodle kits in four flavors priced at $6.99 — a far cry from his restaurant's tasting-menu dinners, which can cost up to $1k for two. Bon appétit.

See you tomorrow,

Jose Kont
The human behind The Investor Society.