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.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)