The Daily Dealflow

Why Send Money Through a Chat?

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

Félix, the Miami-based fintech that lets US-based Latinos send money, get loans and save across Latin America entirely through WhatsApp, raised a $200M Series C — $87M in equity led by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm and $113M in debt from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund. QED Investors, Castle Island Ventures, Switch Ventures, Contour Venture Partners and Endeavor Catalyst also joined the round.

Why This?: It's the cleanest example this week of capital literally moving between Silicon Valley and the rest of the Americas — a US-based fintech, funded largely by Bay Area venture money, built entirely to move dollars into 11 Latin American countries more cheaply and easily than banks or legacy remittance players ever have.

Felix Pago co-founders Manuel Godoy, left, and Bernardo Garcia, right.Source: Felix Pago.

Positive Context:

Revenue has grown 2.5x in the past 12 months and the company has processed more than $8B in transactions since founding, evidence that the "send money over chat" thesis is converting into real, recurring volume rather than one-off usage.
Remittances into Latin America are a massive, sticky market — tens of billions of dollars a year — and Félix's WhatsApp-native design removes the single biggest adoption barrier for underbanked senders: downloading and learning yet another app.

Yes, but:

Félix is directly exposed to US immigration policy and any future taxes or restrictions on remittance flows, a political risk that's largely out of its control.
The "AI plus WhatsApp" remittance playbook is easy to copy, and incumbents from Western Union to a wave of LatAm neobanks are racing toward the same model — Félix's edge has to keep compounding faster than rivals can catch up.

Zoom in: Despite moving more than $8B for its users, Félix has no standalone consumer app at all — the entire product lives inside a WhatsApp chat thread, a deliberately low-friction bet that most well-funded competitors have so far been unwilling to make.

The comment: "Félix has packaged two frontier technologies, AI and blockchain networks, into something simple and consumer-friendly: a better way to send and receive money," said Ali Yahya, General Partner at a16z crypto, per Crunchbase News.

World-wide, there were around 184 million migrants who left their home country in 2023 - driven by economic opportunities, violence and conflict and other motives. Most of these women and men send part of their income to family members and friends in their regions of origin. In 2023, these remittances to low- and middle-income countries amounted to an estimated 656 billion dollars. This is more than international development funds and foreign direct investment in these countries combined. Source: www.schmisalidt.de © Lisa Schmidt, Remitscope.org.

💰 Venture Capital

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Norbert Health (US) – US$14M, Series A led by William A. Marino and Cardinal Group, alongside Exor Seeds and CareIT. Alexandre Winter leads the software company that turns third-party robots into nursing assistants: they take vital signs, speak multiple languages, and log clinical data. Its angel investors include executives from Datadog, Noom, and Owkin—robots, but with medical records. The Investor Society

Empirik (US) – $21M, Seed, AI observability platform that predicts infrastructure outages before they happen by tracking system changes and their downstream effects, aiming to do for infrastructure engineers "what Cursor did for software engineers." Spun out of Sequoia Capital's own incubation program, the company was founded by Avon Puri — Sequoia's former Chief Information Officer — and Sudheer Dhurjati, with ex-Quantum Metric chief product officer Kartik Chandrayana as CEO. Sequoia led the round alongside Canapi and Alumni Ventures; customers already include Guardant Health and a Fortune 500 consumer-goods company – TechCrunch.

Light (US) – US$46M, Series A co-led by Matrix and Activate Capital, with Spark Capital, Mischief, Gigascale, MCJ, and BoxGroup participating. Baker Shogry built an API that lets businesses sell electricity under their own brands, while Light handles the paperwork, wholesale power, and billing; in Texas, it powered every new electricity brand launched in the first half of the year. The Investor Society

Bia Energy (Colombia) – $18.5M, growth round, digital energy platform that buys electricity wholesale and resells it to more than 4,000 Colombian businesses, builds shared solar farms, and runs Olibia, AI software that automates billing and trading for utility companies — modeled loosely on Octopus Energy's Kraken platform. Founded by Sebastián Ruales, Leonardo Velázquez and Guillermo Plaza, the round was led by Kaszek with Endeavor Catalyst, RA Capital, EWA Capital and the Inter-American Development Bank joining; the company now manages roughly 50 GWh a month and is taking its software into Guatemala, Argentina, Chile and Costa Rica – Entorno VC.

PassHub (Brazil) – US$1.4M, pre-seed round led by Parceiro Ventures for its B2B travel-booking platform, which brings flights, hotels, insurance, and ground transportation together for travel agencies. Alan Matheus Barbosa, Fernando Santos, Leonardo Piana, and Marcos Americano lead the company; it signed up more than 2,000 agencies in nine months. The Investor Society

With two months left to go until the midterm elections, the U.S. remains a deeply divided country. Approval ratings of the presidency and of Congress (all in the hands of Republicans) are both near all-time lows amid high inflation and the unpopular trade and actual wars of the current administration. President Donald Trump in recent interviews has repeatedly blamed Congressional Republicans for the expected midterm lull, saying they were more unpopular than him. According to data aggregated and weighted by Silver Bulletin, Democrats currently lead voting intentions for the midterms by almost 7 percentage points, with 48 percent of those surveyed saying they would vote for a Democratic candidate if the election took place today. Democrats have also been able to widen their lead – from fewer than 3 percentage points one year ago to 6.6 percentage points most recently. Source: Statista.

🏛️ Private Equity

Aon (US) – US$17B, acquisition of USI Insurance Services from KKR and its co-investors, strengthening its insurance-brokerage offering for middle-market businesses. Greg Case leads Aon, while Mike Sicard will become global middle-market chairman and CEO; KKR achieved a 6.0x return on its 2017 investment. The deal is entirely debt-financed—not a single share involved. The Investor Society

Axtel (Mexico) – roughly $600M–$632M implied, competing public tender offers, a bidding war has broken out for Mexico's biggest private fiber-optic and cloud-infrastructure challenger to Telmex, pitting US-based Flō Networks (backed by Transtelco Holding) against 4 Tech Plus, an investment vehicle led by Axtel's own co-president, Tomás Milmo Santos. Axtel's board had already given preliminary blessing to Flō's offer before 4 Tech Plus swooped in with a rival bid of roughly MXN$3.86 per CPO — about a 38% premium — sending shares up 5.8% on the news. Parent company Alfa spun Axtel off in 2023 after failing to sell it outright; now two suitors are fighting over what's left – Bloomberg Línea.

GoPro (US, Nasdaq: GPRO) – $285M, merger, the action-camera pioneer agreed to be acquired by Starman Optical, with GoPro shareholders retaining roughly 10% of the combined company and the deal wiping out GoPro's $92M in debt. Founder and CEO Nick Woodman personally injected $20M into the company in July after GoPro warned it "may go out of business" without new funding — a stark comedown for a brand that once IPO'd at a $3B valuation and whose investor base includes YouTuber Markiplier, who holds an 8.5% stake – TechCrunch.

Everus Construction Group (US) – $295M, cash acquisition, the NYSE-listed infrastructure firm bought Epsilon Industries, a manufacturer of modular construction systems, betting that prefabricated building components — rather than stick-built construction — are the faster way to meet demand for data centers, warehouses and housing alike – BusinessWire.

Grupo Elementa (Argentina) – $100M, asset acquisition, the plant-based food and ingredients company controlled by the Pérez Companc family bought the Santa Clara grain, milling and oilseed-refining complex in Rosario from Molinos Río de la Plata — a deal that will roughly quadruple Elementa's industrial capacity to 465,000 tons of grain and 170,000 tons of oil processed per year. Molinos keeps its packaging plant on the same site, and the deal, expected to close in November, is projected to create more than 120 construction jobs – El Cronista.

📈 Public & Capital Markets

US equity markets (US) – benchmark index move, the S&P 500 edged up 0.52% and the Dow gained 0.37% while the Nasdaq slipped 0.06%, as the 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.81% — its highest since November 2023 — on renewed US-Iran tensions. Private employers added just 38,000 jobs in August, the slowest pace since January, and Uber separately announced it's cutting 10% of its workforce – Yahoo Finance.

Broadcom (US, Nasdaq: AVGO) – $29.6B, Q3 FY2026 earnings, the chipmaker beat Wall Street estimates as AI semiconductor revenue hit $16.7B — up 221% year-over-year — and now makes up the majority of its business, with free cash flow of $13.7B and guidance pointing to AI chip revenue accelerating further next quarter. It's Broadcom's ninth straight earnings beat, and alongside Nvidia it's become one of the two stocks Wall Street watches as a real-time gauge of whether the AI infrastructure buildout is still accelerating or starting to cool – 24/7 Wall St..

Dell Technologies (US, NYSE: DELL) – earnings beat, Q2 results sent shares up more than 8% premarket after the company raised its full-year revenue guidance to roughly $192B — up from $167B — and lifted its earnings-per-share forecast to $25.50, driven almost entirely by demand for AI servers from enterprise and cloud customers – TheStreet.

GitLab (US, Nasdaq: GTLB) – earnings beat, shares jumped roughly 21% after the DevOps software company posted stronger-than-expected Q2 results, a rare bright spot for a software sector that's spent much of 2026 fielding questions about whether AI coding tools will eat into demand for traditional developer platforms – TheStreet.

📅 ICYMI

On this day in 1995, Pierre Omidyar launched "AuctionWeb" from his living room — the scrappy start of what became eBay. The very first item ever sold on the site was a broken laser pointer, which fetched $14.83, and three decades later the platform he built almost by accident is still one of the internet's biggest marketplaces – Time and Date.

A new UK survey found that a third of kids starting kindergarten don't know how to use a physical book — some try to swipe or tap the pages like a phone screen. More than a quarter also struggle with basic independence skills like eating or using the toilet on their own – The Hustle.

Meta agreed to pay up to $18B to settle claims from 48 state attorneys general that its platforms harmed kids — but it only owes the full amount if TikTok and YouTube adopt matching restrictions too. Investors shrugged and bid the stock up anyway, given regulators had originally floated penalties in the trillions – Brew Markets.

See you tomorrow,

Jose Kont
The human behind The Investor Society.