Minteo is targeting its beta version to be released next month. The platform should be fully live to the public by the beginning of 2023. Minteo plans to differentiate itself through its infrastructure and focus on working with local artists and brands. The capital will be used to build up the platform, get artists on board from Colombia and Mexico then over time expand into other Latin American countries.
Persado goes beyond “first” to call itself the “only” company to generate personalized marketing messages with a “transformer model fully connected and pre-trained on behavioral data.” They say this “selects the words that will drive action” in ways that other systems do not, and who am I to argue? (Learn about transformer models.) What’s new today is they’ve added an API to embed this magic in other vendors’ systems.
Solvento, the first fintech focused on the transportation sector in Mexico, announced a US$5 million capital raise. Solvento solves many financial needs for carriers: automating payments, invoice financing, and credit. By having those issues solved, they can focus on their operation and growth. The company, which has been in operation since 2021, revealed that it has accumulated $13 million in loans, which have gone to more than 4,000 carriers.
YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.