The Spreadsheet’s Successor Costs $60B
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
Ramp, the New York corporate card and spend management company, reportedly raised about $1.85B at a $60B pre-money valuation. Dragoneer Investment Group and Thrive Capital co-led, and Founders Fund also took part.
Why This?: Ramp's valuation went from $44B in June to $60B, about 36% higher in roughly three months, so investors still pay up for fintechs with an AI story.
Positive Context:
- Ramp serves more than 70,000 businesses and has passed a $1.5B ARR.
- The money goes toward an AI-agent ecosystem, more engineers and a bigger enterprise customer base.
Yes, but:
- At $60B, the valuation would be roughly 40 times the $1.5B run rate.
- Ramp's closest U.S. rival, Brex, was acquired by Capital One earlier this year for $5.15B, less than a tenth of Ramp's target valuation.
"Finance is going through the biggest structural change since the spreadsheet," Ramp CEO Eric Glyman said in the company's June Series F release, as quoted by PYMNTS.
💰 Venture Capital
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Ultra (US) – $50M, Series A, warehouse packing-robot rental platform founded by Jon Miller Schwartz, Max Friefeld, Oliver Ortlieb, and Chetan Parthiban. Framework Ventures led, with Y Combinator participating. Its robots have packed 500,000+ orders—automation on subscription – The Investor Society.
Kapital (Mexico) – $130M, late-stage round mixing equity and debt, at a $2B valuation. The company is a tech firm with a banking license, offering SME loans, digital accounts, investments, multi-currency treasury and international payments. Founders are René Saúl Farro, Arjun Sethi and Fernando Sandoval. Farro points out that Mexico-U.S. trade is about $800B a year versus about $80B in remittances, so he is betting on the bigger pipe – LatAm Republic.
Sonilo (US) – $11M, first funding round, San Francisco software that generates music and adaptive sound effects and syncs them to raw video footage. B Capital led, with Redpoint participating. The team is Shawn Song, Alex Yin, Keli Li and Trista Taylor, so the soundtrack to your next video may arrive without a composer – FinSMEs.
Kapta Space (US) – $24M, Series A, satellite radar payload developer founded by Milton Perque and Adam Bily. Washington Harbour Partners led, Bison Ventures co-led, and Gates-backed MetaVC participated. Both founders previously engineered radar at Echodyne—now they’re aiming higher – The Investor Society.
🏛️ Private Equity
Cable One / Mega Broadband Investments (US) – undisclosed price, pending purchase of the 55% of Mega Broadband (Vyve Broadband) that Cable One does not already own. On Oct. 9, a federal court in New York issued a temporary restraining order blocking the deal after a suit by lender CoBank. Cable One says a proposed refinancing would address $2.45B of obligations, with GTCR among those lined up for the financing – Business Wire.
YPF / YPF Luz (Argentina) – $430M, acquisition of the remaining 24.99% from BNR Power Investments, the vehicle through which GE Vernova held its stake. YPF takes 100% of a power unit with about 3.8 GW of capacity that generates about 10% of Argentina's electricity. The price implies roughly $1.72B for the whole company, about 3.6 times its $479M trailing EBITDA before debt, and YPF has not decided whether to pursue the IPO YPF Luz had requested – Bloomberg Línea.
Trace Medical / LiViliti Health Products (US) – undisclosed amount, majority stake, following FDA 510(k) clearance of LiViliti's Paptizer 360, a device that reduces microbes in CPAP equipment. The deal builds on a strategic equity investment announced in December 2025. Trace Medical, based in Michigan and founded in 2004, is buying into a Sarasota company founded in 2019 – Business Wire.
IonQ / Elisity (US) – up to $1.3B, all-stock acquisition of an enterprise cybersecurity firm, including up to $150M in performance earnouts. Elisity CEO James Winebrenner stays on, and closing is expected in Q4 2026. It is IonQ's third big purchase, after SkyWater at $1.8B in January and Oxford Ionics at $1.1B last year, and the stock slid as much as 5% on the news – Stocktwits.
📈 Public & Capital Markets
JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM), Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC), Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and Citigroup (NYSE: C) – earnings preview, big banks. The four report Tuesday, with Morgan Stanley following Wednesday alongside September CPI. Bank shares fell over the past month, with JPMorgan down 6%, Citi 6.5%, Wells Fargo 7% and Goldman 12%, and the KBW Nasdaq Bank Index sits more than 14% below its August peak – Yahoo Finance.
SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) – spectrum acquisition, satellite and wireless. SpaceX signed a definitive agreement on Oct. 8 to buy Grain Management's nationwide 800 MHz low-band spectrum for a planned standalone Starlink Mobile carrier, reported at about $8B in cash and subject to FCC and DOJ review. Grain bought the spectrum from T-Mobile in August, and SpaceX previously paid about $17B for EchoStar spectrum – SatNews.
Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) and Chipotle (NYSE: CMG) – takeover rumor, restaurants. Starbucks said it is not buying Chipotle, and SBUX rose 1.34% while CMG fell 2.78%. Starbucks reports Oct. 29 after the close, and Brian Niccol, who now runs Starbucks, left Chipotle for the job in 2024 – TheStreet, ROIC.ai.
Iambic Therapeutics (Nasdaq: IAM) and City Therapeutics (Nasdaq: CTY) – IPOs, biotech. Iambic, an Nvidia-backed AI drug-discovery company founded in 2019 as Entos, set terms of $15 to $17 a share for up to $159.4M. City Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass., RNAi company with partners Bausch + Lomb and Biogen, filed terms of $17 to $19 for about $175M at the midpoint – The Star (Reuters), IPOScoop.
📅 ICYMI
Jenn Gidman
You look great, snap a selfie! You never know when it could lead to a scientific discovery. That’s exactly how a new species of giant waterlily was found in Colombia. An eagle-eyed horticulturist spotted the rare plant in the background of an Instagram selfie, leading to a two-year, cross-border collaboration and the identification of a critically endangered waterlily. Vanity — it could save the planet.
Koch Equity Development has agreed to acquire Getty Images via a prepackaged bankruptcy. Getty is the king of newswire photography, but its stock image business has been undercut by AI-generated images. Koch and members of the Getty family will invest $533 million in equity, while lenders agreed to retire around $270 million of outstanding debt.
Hopper puts the average Thanksgiving domestic round trip at $402, up 31%, and Christmas at $452, up 23%, both 10-year highs. Delta's fuel costs are about $6B higher this year, though its refinery is expected to earn about $700M – Brew Markets.
See you tomorrow,
Jose Kont
The human behind The Investor Society.