CB Insights data indicates that despite rapid growth from 2015 to 2020, when Latin American fintechs raised $138 million and $3.14 billion, respectively, 2021 stands apart from other years in terms of growth. Both dollars and deals in the region are going to smash through 2020 and 2019’s superlatives, and indeed have already done so.
Lily AI calls itself the “industry’s first customer intent platform for ecommerce”, which is the sort of claim that raises the question of what – if anything – is really new. The answer seems to be it analyzes product images to extract ten times more attributes than other systems get from text descriptions, correlates those attributes with customer behavior to infer intent, and uses the product to deliver highly targeted search results and recommendations. The company just officially launched but already has testimonials from major retailers.
Business is booming in Latin America: Startups raised $9.3 billion in the first six months of 2021, and the region has produced a record number of unicorns, including Nubank, Rappi and iFood. The growth has caught the eyes and pockets of foreign investors, too, with SoftBank announcing its Latin America Fund II, committing $3 billion to tech companies there.
Salesforce’s Dreamforce mega-conference is next week and the company’s publicity elves are already working overtime. In the first of what are sure to be daily announcements this week, the company announced 100+ industry-specific prompts, data models, and AI capabilities across its fifteen industry clouds. It also launched an AI Use Case Library to house its industry-specific AI offerings.