LatAm Tech Weekly
224: SPECIAL EDITION- Disney’s Permission, deals of the week… and much more!
Weekly writing about what is happening in LatAm tech. By day, I am part of the corporate development team at Itau Unibanco. By night, I am reading and learning about technology in general (now, with a focus on AI). During the weekends, I’m writing the LatAm Tech Weekly. And obviously, always running!
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The Most Valuable Product Disney Sells Isn’t a Ticket — It’s Permission
Happy Sunday!
Before we start, two things.
First: I’m not very good at “turning off.” I’m the kind of person who checks email on vacation. Who says “I’ll just clear my Teams quickly.” Who keeps a quiet, background vigilance running even when I’m supposed to be resting. I know it’s not healthy. I know it’s not optimal. But it is the way I am.
Second: you might be wondering — what does this have to do with technology? Isn’t this supposed to be a newsletter about LatAm tech?
Bear with me. Read through to the end. Because this place — Disney — has everything to do with product, with systems thinking, with distribution, with culture design, with AI. It’s one of the most sophisticated technology companies in the world. It just hides the machinery better than anyone else.
And here’s the twist: on these rides, I forgot about work completely. No e-mails-in-the-head. No background tabs. For a few minutes at a time, my mind was somewhere else.
For someone like me, that’s not trivial.
That’s the product.
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Opinions expressed here are solely my own and does not represent those of people, institutions, organizations that I may or may not be associated with in any capacity, unless explicitly stated.
I’m 36. It’s been 10 years since the last time I was here, and before that I came so often as a kid that the memories blur together: the heat, the music, the lines, the small rituals that somehow felt enormous.
This time, I brought my stepdaughter. She’s 4. And watching her see this place for the first time feels like borrowing someone else’s nervous system—like my adult brain is getting a backstage pass to wonder.
There’s a plaque Walt Disney read aloud on opening day that still explains the business model like nothing else:
“To all who come to this happy place — welcome… here age relives fond memories of the past… and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.”
That’s not poetry as decoration.
It’s a product spec.
1. “He’s out of his mind.” The persistence layer
Disneyland’s opening in 1955 is often remembered as inevitable in hindsight. It wasn’t. (Yes, California opened before Orlando) It was a high-wire act with real financial risk, constant second-guessing, and a famously chaotic opening day (heat, unfinished work, operational failures).
What matters for builders isn’t the trivia. It’s the pattern:
A new category (a “theme park,” not an amusement park).
Skepticism from incumbents (who judged it by old category rules).
A launch that was messy (because ambitious things usually are).
Iteration as the strategy (not a post-mortem).
Walt’s most useful line for founders isn’t about dreaming. It’s about never being “done”:
“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”
In startups we talk about persistence like it’s grit. Disney’s version is more specific: persistence as continuous editing. Not stubbornness—revision.
2. The hidden craft: details that don’t look like “tech,” but behave like it
Disney parks are a masterclass in what product people would call end-to-end experience design. Not just the ride. Not just the UI. The entire funnel—from anticipation → onboarding → payoff → memory.
And here’s something easy to overlook:
The line itself is part of the product.
Queues at Disney aren’t dead time. They’re narrative scaffolding. In Rise of the Resistance, you’re not waiting — you’re being recruited. In Haunted Mansion, the stretching room isn’t “holding space”; it’s tension-setting. Even the architecture gradually transitions you from the outside world into a different logic.
The queue is onboarding. The payoff is amplified because the context was carefully built.
Even something like TRON Lightcycle works this way. By the time you board, you’ve already passed through a light-sculpted digital environment that primes you for speed, futurism, and identity transfer. The ride feels shorter than your anticipation — but that’s intentional. The emotional ramp was already loading in the queue.
Product lesson: pre-experience is part of experience.
(See below the queue of Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance)
The sensory stack (yes, including smell)
There’s a reason you can feel your shoulders drop even when the park is crowded. The place is full of cues that tell your body: you’re safe; you can play now.
Scent is one of the most underrated ones. Disney has used controlled scent-delivery systems for decades—often nicknamed “Smellitzers”—to sync smell with story beats.
That’s why rides can be so weirdly transporting. You’re not just seeing Pandora in Avatar: Flight of Passage—you’re catching ocean/forest notes at the exact moment your brain is most persuadable. (It’s not an accident; it’s choreography.)
For someone like me — whose mind is usually parsing emails that don’t exist yet — this matters.
It interrupts the loop.
Work brain runs on prediction and obligation. Disney disrupts that with controlled novelty and multi-sensory coherence. Your attention stops scanning issues at work because the environment outcompetes it.
The “I forgot myself” effect: rides as temporary identity switches
If you want concrete examples where even the most hyper-vigilant people disconnect:
Avatar: Flight of Passage (Animal Kingdom): the full-body interface + scent + motion creates an “I’m somewhere else” conviction.
Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind (EPCOT): story + music + motion turns anxiety into laughter so fast it feels like a hack.
Pirates of the Caribbean / Haunted Mansion (Magic Kingdom): classic dark-ride pacing that lets your nervous system settle into a guided dream.
TRON Lightcycle / Run (Magic Kingdom): high-acceleration immersion wrapped in a digital mythos that makes you feel like you’re entering a system, not a coaster.
Disney’s most impressive trick isn’t immersion.
It’s attention capture without exhaustion.
3. Culture as operating system: how the staff becomes part of the product
Disney doesn’t call employees “employees” in the park context. They’re Cast Members—and that’s not branding fluff. It’s a system design choice: if guests are in a story, staff can’t be “outside” the story.
This is why training is so central. Disney’s Traditions onboarding is explicitly about heritage, intent, and role in the “show,” not just procedures.
The deeper lesson for companies: training isn’t information transfer. It’s emotional alignment.
In tech terms: Disney treats culture like production infrastructure. If you don’t build it deliberately, you get outages—inconsistency, cold interactions, broken trust.
4. The tech/AI layer: staying current without breaking the spell
Disney has a unique constraint: they can’t ship technology that feels like technology. The goal is always: the magic gets credit, not the machine.
So the innovation is often invisible.
The guest OS: app + wearables as a soft control plane
At Walt Disney World, the My Disney Experience app isn’t just a convenience feature. It’s a real-time operating layer for navigation, plans, queues, and payments.
MagicBand+ is a wearable interface designed to reduce friction (entry, room access, payments, pictures) while adding subtle haptics/lights that keep you inside the story.
This is Disney doing what the best consumer tech does: remove steps until the experience feels like it’s reading your mind.
AI that serves story
Disney Imagineering has been using reinforcement learning to make robotic characters more believable — movement that approaches the limits of hardware while still feeling emotionally true to the character.
This is the important distinction for anyone building with AI:
Not AI for novelty.
AI for believability.
AI as a tool in service of narrative.
If the model is visible, the spell is weaker.
Disney as a system, not a park
The modern Disney story — from films to parks to streaming — is essentially about building a self-reinforcing flywheel: IP → films → parks → merch → streaming → back to IP.
That’s not “media.” That’s systems architecture.
And for founders in LatAm (and everywhere): the strongest companies don’t build products.
They build loops.
What I’m learning here (and what I want my stepdaughter to learn later)
I don’t turn off easily. I know that about myself.
But somewhere between the storytelling queues, the smell of a scene changing at exactly the right moment, the acceleration of TRON, and my stepdaughter gripping my hand before a drop at Tiana’s (aka Splash Mountain) — the vigilance dissolved.
Not because I tried to “be present.”Because the product was coherent enough to earn my attention.
Watching a 4-year-old meet wonder in real time makes you realize how rare it is to feel wholly present. Disney manufactures that presence with story, sensory craft, operational excellence — and then quietly upgrades the machinery underneath so the spell never breaks.
If you’re building in tech and AI, there are three uncomfortable takeaways:
The real moat is coherence.
Not features. Not models. Coherence across the whole experience.Culture is an engineering problem.
If the human layer is inconsistent, the product is inconsistent.AI should disappear into the narrative.
If users notice your AI, you might be using it wrong. Disney’s best tech is felt as magic, not seen as machinery.
And maybe the deepest lesson — standing here, older, grateful, unexpectedly light — is this:
The most valuable innovation isn’t escapism.
It’s permission.
Permission to step out of obligation.
Permission to forget, briefly, the inbox.
Permission to remember who you were —
and become, for a moment, someone who believes in impossible things again.
PS: If you plan to come to Disney, I highly recommend you to look at a service called ZIPA, founded by a Brazilian! Makes total difference.
General news:
Global66 processed $3.7B in transactions in 2025 (+157% YoY), with Colombia emerging as a key growth engine after volumes jumped 214% to $543M and total cross-border flows surged 600%. The fintech also added stablecoin capabilities ($1M processed) and is evaluating an international banking license ahead of 2026 targets of >100% processing growth and up to 100% revenue expansion. 🇨🇴
Monnet Payments launched its regional Virtual Accounts service, becoming the first provider in LatAm to offer unified, fully traceable infrastructure that enables international companies to collect local payments through a single API. The solution delivers real-time payer ID, automated reconciliation and local-currency collections across Peru, Mexico and Argentina, with Chile and Colombia next. 🇵🇪
Lyra Colombia launched Send, a payments orchestration solution that automates large-scale bank disbursements, enabling companies to transfer funds to hundreds or thousands of accounts in a single workflow. The platform provides API or web integration, real-time confirmations, multibank coverage and end-to-end traceability for high-volume use cases such as payroll and supplier payments. 🇨🇴
Khipu is scaling its AI- and OCR-driven expense reporting platform to address manual processes that can cost companies 5%–10% of annual revenue. After a $150K initial round, the startup targets 250 clients and $100K in monthly revenue, with expansion into Chile and Colombia and a potential $500K–$1M raise planned for 2026. 🇵🇪
Deals:
Cenit launched in Mexico backed by a $1.8M seed round led by Hi Ventures, deploying an AI assistant integrated with SAT to automate compliance for RESICO and payroll taxpayers. The company targets 100,000 users in Mexico while scaling predictive tax tools across Latin America. 🇲🇽
Deals:
Kavak raised a $300M Series F led by Andreessen Horowitz, including $200M from its Growth fund in the firm’s largest LatAm investment. The company reported ~120,000 transactions in 2025 (+~40% YoY) and its first full month of global profitability, while its fintech arm surpassed $1B in originations and reached a $600M annualized run rate. Proceeds will support balance sheet strength and fund fintech, AI and marketplace expansion across LatAm and Gulf markets. 🇲🇽
Kubo Financiero and Crédito Maestro are advancing a 610M-peso merger to expand in Mexico’s digital savings and lending market, pending regulatory approval. The combination pairs Kubo’s CNBV license and tech platform with Maestro’s capital and distribution, aiming to improve capitalization, strengthen credit metrics and accelerate growth despite Kubo’s current profitability and delinquency pressures. 🇲🇽
Habi acquired Argentina-based Pulppo to accelerate regional expansion, adding Pulppo’s 100+ partner-agency network and local platform to its model spanning rapid home purchases, digital resale and mortgage intermediation. With operations in Colombia and Mexico, Habi aims to scale its end-to-end housing finance ecosystem across Latin America. 🇨🇴
General news:
Brazil’s innovation market reached an inflection point in 2025, with venture funding projected at ~$2.3B and seed/Series A rounds growing more than 18%, alongside ~12,000 active startups and 1,550+ M&A deals. Bossa Invest deployed R$31M and reached 11 cumulative exits, signaling continued selectivity into 2026. 🇧🇷
ADvendio launched Revenue OS for Agentic Advertising to recover the 28% of work time lost to manual middleware, anchored by its AdOne engine for autonomous planning, execution and optimization. The suite includes AdGateway, AdFinance and AdPortal, each powered by specialized AI agents, with global rollout planned for Q1 2026. 🌎
Microsoft unveiled plans to invest $50B in AI across the Global South by 2030 alongside a trajectory toward $8B in annual cloud and AI data center spending, including major deployments in Brazil, Mexico and Chile and workforce programs such as ConectaAI targeting five million Brazilians. 🇧🇷
Mexico faces pressure to modernize payments infrastructure ahead of the 2026 World Cup, with fewer than 24% of companies running unified commerce models and providers accelerating AI-driven fraud prevention and system upgrades to handle expected cross-border demand. 🇲🇽
Plata received a full banking license from Mexico’s CNBV, enabling the digital-first neobank to expand beyond its credit card product as it scales from ~3M active customers using proprietary core infrastructure. 🇲🇽
Deals:
World Labs raised $1B backed by Autodesk, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia and AMD to accelerate spatial intelligence development, with its Marble platform generating persistent high-fidelity 3D worlds for robotics, creativity and scientific discovery. 🌎
General news:
Itaú’s TEF platform Scope is undergoing a major overhaul after being reacquired from NCR Brasil, with full cloud migration, open APIs and a dedicated Conexão Tech service layer. The platform now operates across 70,000 POS and integrates with more than 100 software houses, nearly tripling market share in six months as new fiscal regulations drive demand. The initiative aims to boost Itaú’s competitiveness in Brazil’s concentrated acquiring infrastructure market through stronger security, availability and connectivity. 🇧🇷
Brazil’s data center boom is accelerating with incentives that could unlock up to R$2T in digital infrastructure investment, but rapid GPU upgrade cycles and steep depreciation are reshaping AI economics. Hyperscalers are extending server lifespans to reduce costs, while the secondary IT asset market—already valued near $29B—is emerging as a strategic lever through hardware redeployment and value-cascade models. 🇧🇷
Alphabet and Sea Group partnered to develop AI tools for Shopee and Garena, including a prototype agent-based shopping experience aimed at automating checkout and cross-app commerce. With Shopee holding 52% market share in Southeast Asia, the collaboration seeks to monetize advanced AI while improving gaming development productivity and deepening ecosystem integration. 🌏
PicPay and Agibank shares showed mixed post-IPO performance, with PicPay closing at $15.10 and reducing cumulative losses to ~20.5% (valuation near $1.96B), while Agibank remains below its IPO price. The broader Brazilian digital banking cohort has recently posted gains, signaling selective investor re-engagement despite global risk volatility. 🇧🇷
Brazil’s Central Bank signaled tokenization will reshape the financial system by simplifying operations, lowering costs and expanding financial inclusion. Regulators highlighted that digital assets and new payment rails are creating parallel infrastructures that will require updated rules while supporting broader access to credit and banking services. 🇧🇷
Brazil’s AI workforce shows a widening gender gap, with men representing more than 77% of professionals—about 7.6 percentage points above the global average. Women account for just 0.11% of LinkedIn AI roles versus 0.37% for men, raising concerns about income inequality, algorithmic bias and long-term talent competitiveness. 🇧🇷
Deals:
ONEVC closed its third fund at $50M, maintaining a concentrated pre-seed and seed strategy with typical checks between $1.5M and $2M and a portfolio size similar to its prior vehicle. The LP base is now predominantly institutional, and the firm is increasingly backing AI-driven startups while keeping roughly 80% of capital allocated to Brazil. 🇧🇷
Solvento secured $25M from BBVA Spark to expand liquidity for logistics and supply-chain operators in Mexico. The facility includes a preferred tranche for large corporates and is designed to extend credit across carriers and suppliers facing persistent working-capital gaps. 🇲🇽
Moondo launched a R$4.28M public round on EqSeed to scale its lab-grown leather platform and proprietary production infrastructure. The company is targeting the high-luxury segment and positioning its animal-free material within a global leather market projected to reach $376B by 2029. 🇧🇷
Mobility platform 99 raised R$700M via an FIDC to expand credit through its fintech arm 99Pay. Since launching lending in 2022, the company has originated R$6B in loans and built an active portfolio of about R$1.8B, supported by a user base exceeding 26M in Brazil. 🇧🇷
General news:
Spedy closed 2025 with 143% MRR growth and 42% EBITDA, serving more than 7,000 companies and processing over R$5B in transactions. The fiscal automation platform is benefiting from Brazil’s tax reform and rising e-commerce complexity, which are driving demand for scalable compliance infrastructure among SMBs and SaaS sellers. The company targets R$1M in MRR by end-2026 while expanding APIs and launching an integrated tax and logistics solution. 🇧🇷
Bitcoin has fallen about 30% year to date, marking its weakest start to a year, dropping from roughly R$489.7K on Jan. 1 to R$348.4K. Checkonchain data shows the 2026 performance index at 0.752—below both historical bear and bull averages—while TradingView indicators continue to signal downside risk amid expected macro and election-cycle volatility. 🌎
BC Protege+ surpassed 1M activations since its Dec. 2025 launch, with financial institutions running about 70.9M verification queries and flagging 255,700 protected cases. As mandatory checks become embedded in onboarding flows, the Central Bank expects the system to materially strengthen fraud prevention and user control over financial data. 🇧🇷
Deals:
Lebane raised a $4M seed round led by Atlantico to accelerate regional expansion and evolve its AI-powered construction management assistant into a financial platform for developers. Founded in Argentina and already serving 50–60 clients in Mexico, the startup is prioritizing the Mexican market while positioning its WhatsApp-native platform to centralize financial and operational data in an under-digitized sector. 🇦🇷
iFood invested $1M in drone logistics startup Speedbird Aero, complementing the company’s $5.7M Series A and reinforcing its autonomous delivery strategy. Speedbird has completed more than 2,000 drone flights following permanent ANAC approval and is preparing to scale routes beyond Aracaju while planning a future Series B. 🇧🇷
EFEX raised an $8M seed round co-led by PayPal Ventures and Floodgate after growing revenue sixfold and surpassing $1B in processed volume. The cross-border treasury platform will use the capital to deepen AI integration and expand across the Mexico–U.S. corridor as it targets inefficiencies in global payments. 🇲🇽
Ligga Telecom agreed to sell part of its assets and liabilities to Brasil TecPar in a transaction valuing the company at R$1.7B, including ~R$480M in equity and ~R$1.2B in assumed debt. The deal advances TecPar’s consolidation strategy while helping restructure Ligga’s capital base. 🇧🇷
Visa signed a definitive agreement to acquire Prisma Medios de Pago and Newpay from Advent International to accelerate digital payments adoption in Argentina. The integration will combine card processing, real-time payments and the Banelco ATM network with Visa’s tokenization and risk capabilities, with closing expected in fiscal 2Q26. 🇦🇷
Google officially launched an upgraded version of its AI model called Gemini 3.1 Pro — a significant update meant to improve core reasoning and performance on complex tasks across both consumer and developer platforms. The new version is rolling out now in preview via Google’s AI tools and services.
Why it matters:
This isn’t a minor tweak — it’s billed as a notable improvement over the existing Gemini 3 Pro lineup, especially in logic, synthesis, and advanced reasoning.
It’s positioned as a direct competitor to leading models like OpenAI’s GPT family.
People on LinkedIn and Twitter were buzzing about how this could reshape enterprise use cases and model benchmarks (e.g., developers, startups, and AI leaders debating its practical impact).
South Summit Brazil 2026
Date: March 25–27, 2026
Location: Porto Alegre, Brazil
Description: A global innovation platform connecting startups, corporations, and investors to foster entrepreneurship and scalable business growth.
More infoBrazil at Silicon Valley 2026
Date: April 6–8, 2026
Location: Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Description: A conference connecting Brazilian leaders and entrepreneurs with Silicon Valley to promote innovation, investment, and cross-border business.
More infoVTEX Day 2026
Date: April 16–17, 2026
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Description: One of the world’s largest digital commerce events, bringing together global retail leaders, brands, and technology innovators.
More infoGramado Summit 2026
Date: May 6–8, 2026
Location: Gramado, Brazil
Description: A technology and innovation festival combining business, strategy, marketing, and public-sector innovation discussions.
More infoRIO2C 2026
Date: May 26–June 1, 2026
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Description: A creativity-driven event connecting technology, media, audiovisual, music, sustainability, and entrepreneurship.
More infoSouth Summit Madrid 2026
Date: June 3–5, 2026
Location: Madrid, Spain
Description: A global innovation conference connecting startups seeking scale with investors and corporations looking for new opportunities.
More infoWeb Summit Rio 2026
Date: June 8–11, 2026
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Description: Part of the Web Summit global series, the event connects startups, investors, and tech leaders across Latin America.
More infoFebraban Tech 2026
Date: June 24–26, 2026
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Description: One of the main financial technology and innovation events for the banking and financial services sector in Latin America.
More info
Nothing much this week…
Disney songs (literally all day)
HAKUNA MATATA!