E-commerce giant Mercado Libre and Brazilian unicorn Creditas teamed up to offer credit for car purchases between individuals. This is not the only alliance between large technology companies in LatAm, as the Mexican used-car unicorn Kavak allied with credit institutions in Chile.
Funding to Latin American startups plunged in the first quarter of 2023, hitting the lowest point in over two years amid a continued sharp contraction in late-stage dealmaking. Overall, investment in reported seed through growth stage financings in Q1 was down 84% from the year-ago quarter, per Crunchbase data. That puts Central and South America, which just over a year ago ranked as the fastest-growing startup investment region in the world, on the short list for the fastest shrinking.
It was entirely predictable that Amazon would add a ChatGPT-style search function to its online marketplace. In fact, this blog post discussed it just last week. But, as with other chat-based search alternatives, there are questions of how Amazon avoids losing revenue from conventional search ads and whether consumers can trust the chat results are not merely based on who is paying for them.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.