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.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce announced a set of new integrations, including sales of Salesforce products on the AWS Marketplace and easier data sharing between Salesforce Data Cloud and AWS data services. Most of the changes are fairly technical but the general lesson is that even mighty Salesforce is ultimately a guest on turf controlled by AWS.