Sweden Just Bought a Piece of Brazil

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

Sweden's Boliden agreed to acquire Brazilian conglomerate Votorantim's 64.68% controlling stake in Nexa Resources — the Brazil/Peru zinc and silver producer — for $1.31B in an all-stock deal implying a $2.03B equity value and a $3.67B enterprise value, with a follow-on cash tender offer planned for the remaining minority shares – Mining.com.

Why This?: The deal reshapes global zinc supply around South American assets and tests whether a European acquirer can cleanly navigate Brazilian and Peruvian tax, regulatory, and minority-shareholder rules — a template every future cross-border Americas mining deal will be measured against.

Positive Context:

• The transaction lifts Boliden's zinc output by 62%, copper by 14%, and silver by 64%, and is expected to boost EPS by more than 8% immediately.
• It comes at a 14% premium to Nexa's 20-day volume-weighted average price, with the combined entity generating roughly $14.3B in annual revenue.

Yes, but:

• BMO Capital Markets flagged that "meaningful synergies aren't immediately obvious," and Boliden's net debt-to-equity ratio is projected to jump to 33% from 24%.
• Peru requires a mandatory minority tender offer within six months of close, and larger Boliden shareholders face a 30% Peruvian indirect-transfer tax on the deal.

Zoom in: Votorantim isn't fully cashing out — it's taking 21.4 million newly issued Boliden shares as payment, making it a roughly 7% shareholder in the company that just bought its mine.

The comment: "The transaction will reinforce our standing as a globally important base metal producer and bring a healthy addition to our precious metal business," said Mikael Staffas, President and CEO of Boliden, via PR Newswire.

💰 Venture Capital

TerraBlaster (US) – $12.5M, Seed, IoT soil-nutrition sensor platform giving farmers real-time nutrient-deficit maps to optimize fertilizer use – FinSMEs.

Levanta (US) – $22M, Series B, creator-affiliate commerce platform managing brand-influencer partnerships and payouts across Amazon, Walmart and Shopify – Business Insider.

RQD* Clearing Raises $74 Million From Bain Capital to Push Into Digital Assets - The Investor Society.

Cloverleaf AI (US) – $8M, Series A, B2G sales-intelligence platform tracking 70,000+ public-sector agencies for procurement signals ahead of RFPs – FinSMEs.

Quaise Energy (US) – $180M, Series B, millimeter-wave drilling technology built to reach superhot geothermal rock for utility-scale power plants – Yahoo Finance.

Arga Labs (US) – $10M, Seed, sandbox platform that builds synthetic replicas of enterprise tools like Salesforce and Workday to safely test AI agents before production – FinSMEs.

Maglut Heavy Industries (US) – $3.1M, Pre-Seed, chromatography-based refining technology to process raw rare earth elements for domestic electronics and aerospace manufacturers – Mining Weekly.

Hermetiq (US) – $2.2M, Seed, LLM-based platform that detects, diagnoses and proposes fixes for CI/CD build failures in real time – FinSMEs.

🏛️ Private Equity

Grainger (US) – $210M, acquisition, MRO/industrial distributor buying AWM's inventory-management technology and IP to expand its B2B distribution platform – Industrial Distribution.

Arrive Logistics (US) – undisclosed amount, majority stake, Austin-based truckload freight brokerage selling a majority stake to Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Capital to fund expansion – FreightWaves.

Geary Veterinary Hospital (US) – undisclosed amount, buyout add-on, nearly 50-year-old Walnut Creek veterinary practice acquired by Great Point Partners-backed VetnCare as a platform add-on – PE Hub.

Nexa Resources (Brazil/Peru) – $1.31B, controlling-stake acquisition, Brazil/Peru zinc and silver producer whose 64.68% stake Votorantim is selling to Sweden's Boliden ahead of a minority tender offer – Mining.com.

Pfanenstiel Company oil & gas assets (US) – $48M proved PV-10, asset acquisition, non-operated Williston Basin interests across 377 producing wells acquired by Callan Power – GlobeNewswire.

📈 Public & Capital Markets

Elastic (US) – Q2 CY2026 earnings, revenue of $478.1M (+15.1% YoY) beating estimates, search-and-AI platform built on open-source Elasticsearch for observability and security analytics – StockStory.

Workday (US) – Q2 FY2027 earnings, revenue of $2.65B (+12.8% YoY) but "lukewarm" results that cooled recent enterprise-software gains, cloud platform for HR, finance and planning – Bloomberg.

Best Buy (US) – Q2 FY2026 earnings, revenue of $9.78B beating estimates and a raised full-year outlook, consumer-electronics retailer for appliances, computers and home-office gear – StockStory.

Affirm Holdings (US) – Q4 FY2026 earnings, revenue of $1.17B and card volume up 146% YoY to $2.13B across 4.4M active cardholders, buy-now-pay-later fintech offering pay-over-time checkout financing – Investing.com.

Ulta Beauty (US) – Q2 FY2026 earnings, revenue of $3.04B (+8.9% YoY), retailer of prestige and mass-market makeup, skincare and fragrance – StockStory.

Exascale Labs Holdings (US) – SPAC merger, San Francisco-based GPU-as-a-service and modular data-center platform for AI compute began trading on Nasdaq as "XLAB" after closing its combination with D. Boral ARC Acquisition I Corp – GlobeNewswire.

📅 ICYMI

On this day in 2009, Apple released Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" — an unusually feature-light major OS update pitched purely as a performance and stability overhaul, and the first Mac release to drop PowerPC support entirely – Wikipedia.

Turns out the "genius in a garage" is mostly myth: a study of 2.7 million company founders found the average founder age at founding is 42, and among the fastest-growing 0.1% of startups, founders averaged 45 – Harvard Business Review.

ChatGPT hit 100 million monthly users just two months after launch, a ramp UBS analysts called the fastest they'd seen in 20 years of covering internet apps — TikTok took about nine months and Instagram roughly two and a half years to reach the same mark – Yahoo Finance.

The internet's first-ever banner ad, AT&T's 1994 "You Will" campaign on HotWired.com, reportedly pulled a 44% click-through rate — a number today's advertisers can only dream of, with modern display ads typically running under 1% – Digiday.

See you on monday,

Jose Kont
The human behind The Investor Society.

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