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Brazil has humbled some of North America’s biggest technology companies.

Uber Eats. Amazon. Meta. Snapchat. Shopify. Stripe.

Not exactly six guys building an app from a garage.

These companies showed up with billions of dollars, world-class teams, globally recognized brands and playbooks that had already worked in a dozen other countries. And yet, Brazil still found a way to make them look like amateurs.

Ask why, and you’ll usually hear some version of the same answer: Brazil is complicated. The taxes are insane. The currency is volatile. The bureaucracy is relentless. The politics are unpredictable.

All true. But honestly, every major market is complicated. Companies entering China, India or the European Union expect to rebuild parts of the business. They adapt the product, put actual decision-makers on the ground and accept that getting the market right will require time, money and a few painful lessons.

But Brazil doesn’t get the same treatment.

It gets the translated website, the regional team, a modest budget and a nice launch event in São Paulo.

Which is crazy when you consider what Brazil has already produced.

It built Nubank into one of the world’s largest digital banks, with a market cap of around $70 billion. It turned MercadoLibre into a company worth roughly $100 billion on a good day. It made WhatsApp basically the operating system of its economy and became one of WhatsApp Business’s three largest revenue-generating markets.

Then it took Pix from zero to nearly 80 billion annual transactions in five years, beating Visa and Mastercard at their own game.

Brazil clearly knows how to build and adopt enormous technology businesses.

The question is why so many foreign companies still underestimate what it takes to become one of them.

Brazil has its own operating system

Global technology companies, but mostly American ones, tend to treat localization as an interface problem.

Translate the website. Hire a country manager. Run some Brazilian ads. Add Portuguese customer support. Done.

Except Brazil requires a dramatically different approach.

You have to localize the device, payment methods, pricing, invoicing, distribution, regulatory strategy, operating footprint, investment horizon and sometimes even the corporate culture.

Let’s start with the device.

Brazil is not “mobile-first” in the Silicon Valley sense of making sure the website also looks decent on an iPhone. For a huge part of the country, the phone is the internet.

In 2025, 65% of Brazil’s 157 million internet users accessed the internet exclusively through a mobile phone. Among the lowest-income socioeconomic classes, that figure reached 87%.

And we are not talking about millions of people scrolling on the latest iPhone with unlimited 5G. Brazil is overwhelmingly an Android market. Millions of people use lower-cost devices, prepaid plans and constrained data.

If your product assumes an iPhone and unlimited data, translating it into Portuguese will not make it Brazilian.

Snapchat learned that the hard way. Its Android app was buggy and data-hungry at exactly the moment Instagram, already much stronger on Android, was aggressively copying its best feature.

Snapchat had the original idea. Instagram had the product that worked on the phones Brazilians actually owned.

You can guess how that ended.

But the device is only half the story.

The phone also comes with a behavior that can be difficult for American companies to grasp: everything in life and business in Brazil already happens on WhatsApp.

WhatsApp worked well on inexpensive Android phones, used little data and was frequently exempted from mobile-data caps. That helped make it the default way Brazilians communicated. Then businesses followed the customers.

By 2026, 82% of Brazilian SMBs used WhatsApp as their main channel for communication and sales.

That was a major roadblock for Slack, if you ask me. The company was not simply competing with other workplace-software providers, but with WhatsApp groups that were already on everyone’s phone and cost nothing.

Slack’s Brazilian go-to-market was essentially a Portuguese-language version of the same dollar-priced, per-seat product sold elsewhere. That left the company stuck between two monsters.

Below it was WhatsApp: ubiquitous and free. Above it was Microsoft Teams, bundled into software companies were already paying for.

That is a very tough place to build a business, especially in a non-core market.

The lesson is simple: adapt the economics and infrastructure of the product to Brazil instead of waiting for Brazil to adapt to the product.

Oh, and if your Brazilian go-to-market strategy does not account for the devices people use and the work they already do on WhatsApp, you do not have a Brazilian go-to-market strategy.

Then there is PIX

In November 2020, Brazil’s central bank launched Pix. Less than six years later, more than 170 million Brazilians, about 80% of the country, were using it.

Pix is on track to process around 82 billion transactions in 2026 alone.

That is kind of insane.

Pix did not simply give Brazilians a faster way to move money. It changed the competitive structure of the entire payments market.

Transfers became instant and free for individuals. Every major banking app had to put Pix front and center. Small merchants could accept digital payments without buying card terminals or paying the same fees. Millions of consumers could participate in digital commerce without owning a credit card.

And foreign payment companies suddenly found themselves competing against public infrastructure that was faster, cheaper and already connected to every bank.

WhatsApp Pay discovered this in real time.

Meta launched it nationally in June 2020 through a card partnership with Cielo, Brazil’s largest card processor. About a week later, Brazil’s central bank told Visa and Mastercard to suspend the service. Brazil’s competition regulator separately blocked the Cielo agreement.

That escalated quickly.

What Facebook saw as the natural extension of WhatsApp’s dominance looked very different to Brazilian authorities: the country’s most powerful communications platform connecting itself to its largest card acquirer through a closed payment system.

Five months later, Pix went live.

By the time WhatsApp’s merchant-payment product returned, much of its original purpose had disappeared. Brazilians could already send a Pix payment as easily as they could send a message. Eventually, banks began putting Pix directly inside WhatsApp conversations.

Meta correctly predicted that messaging and payments would converge. It just got one important detail wrong: who would own the rail underneath them.

Shopify made a different version of the same mistake. It entered Brazil without the part of the business that makes Shopify especially powerful elsewhere: Shopify Payments.

Brazilian merchants must connect outside gateways to accept Pix, boleto and instalments, the payment methods their customers actually use. They may then owe Shopify an additional transaction fee for using those outside providers.

Imagine telling a small Brazilian merchant:

We do not provide the payment product you need. Please go find someone who does. Also, you may owe us extra for using them.

Great pitch.

Stripe arrived with the same blind spot. Its early Brazilian product supported no Pix, boleto, Elo cards or instalments. It added Pix through local partner EBANX in August 2025, nearly five years after Pix launched and roughly four years after Stripe entered Brazil.

Those may sound like a few missing integrations. But the truth is, Brazilian credit cards come with interest-free instalments. Acquirers make money by advancing the resulting receivables to merchants. Boleto still matters for consumers who do not use cards. High interest rates change the economics of extending credit. And Pix is public infrastructure operated by the central bank.

Payments in Brazil are not a feature to add later. They determine who can buy, how merchants get paid and whether the platform can make money.

The tax layer is the product

The same principle applies to software.

American SaaS companies tend to think the software is the product and compliance is an annoying implementation detail. In Brazil, compliance is often the product.

Brazilian companies deal with electronic invoices, payroll rules, federal taxes, 27 state tax regimes and municipal service taxes across more than 5,500 municipalities. Every time the rules change, the software has to change with them.

This gives local software companies an extraordinary retention engine. Their customers are not merely paying for a dashboard with nicer features. They are paying to remain operational.

That helps explain why TOTVS dominates Brazil’s small- and medium-sized business ERP segment, while global giants like SAP and Oracle perform much better with large enterprises.

Local vendors also have another advantage before anyone even logs into the software: they issue Brazilian invoices in reais.

A company buying software directly from the United States may pay 35–48% more after Brazilian taxes are added to the dollar-denominated invoice. That difference can decide which product gets bought before anyone compares the features.

The cost of entering lightly

Amazon entered Brazil in 2012 with digital books. Then it added physical books. Then it opened a broader marketplace without owning the inventory or logistics.

Its first fulfillment center for the broader retail business arrived in 2019, seven years after entry.

Let’s call this a capital-efficient market test: launch the marketplace, prove demand and add the expensive infrastructure later.

Well, in Brazil, it failed miserably.

In Brazilian e-commerce, logistics was not a cost to defer until the market had been proven.

Logistics was the market.

Addresses can be inconsistent. Distances are enormous. Taxes vary across states. Deliveries have to reach dense urban neighborhoods, remote communities and regions poorly served by existing infrastructure.

You cannot solve that with a nicer website.

MercadoLibre had started building its own answer years earlier. First came the marketplace. Then payments. Then logistics. Then credit.

Each layer strengthened the others. Better logistics brought more buyers. More buyers attracted more sellers. Payment data supported lending. Credit generated more transactions.

By the time Amazon committed heavily to physical infrastructure, MercadoLibre had already connected the marketplace, payments, logistics and credit into one business. Amazon was no longer trying to catch up in e-commerce. It was trying to catch up across four businesses at once.

Uber Eats ran into a similar problem with infrastructure and density.

At its peak, Uber Eats operated in no more than 300 Brazilian cities. At the time, iFood was present in roughly 900, about three times as many.

And geography was only part of it.

Uber Eats was primarily selling restaurants access to customers and couriers and, in some cases, charging commissions of up to roughly 35% for doing it.

iFood had spent years building the business around the delivery. Field salespeople signed up restaurants. Software helped them manage orders. Restaurants could use iFood’s couriers or their own. The company also built financial products and a corporate meal-benefits business that generated another source of demand.

iFood secured exclusive agreements with major restaurant chains as well,

making some of Brazil’s most popular brands unavailable on competing apps.

Uber Eats entered food delivery as an extension of a global logistics network. iFood built itself into part of the restaurant industry.

By June 2021, iFood had approximately 83% of Brazilian food-delivery orders. Uber Eats had 13%.

Seven months later, Uber announced it was shutting down restaurant delivery in Brazil. Then, in 2025, Uber put iFood inside its own app.

That is one hell of a concession.

In markets where logistics, payments or field operations create the moat, entering lightly does not prove demand. It produces an inferior product.

Who got Brazil right

Brazilians have a saying: “O Brasil não é para amadores.”

Brazil is not for amateurs.

The companies that won here did not tiptoe into Brazil. They went all in and made product and business decisions around the market that actually existed.

Netflix arrived early, priced in reais and installed caching technology inside Brazilian internet providers. The local price made the service affordable. The local infrastructure made it watchable.

Then Netflix invested heavily in Brazilian programming, turning the country from a foreign distribution market into a source of shows it could export around the world.

Spotify used its free tier and local distribution partnerships to lower the barrier to entry. In a market where consumers already had abundant access to free music, it did not insist that everyone begin with a paid subscription. It won distribution first and monetized later.

Uber’s ride-hailing business did something Uber Eats did not: it adapted aggressively.

Uber added cash payments for riders without credit cards. Then it allowed users to buy prepaid Uber Cash at hundreds of thousands of physical locations. The company also fought for, and eventually secured, a federal legal framework that prevented municipalities from banning ride-hailing services outright.

Salesforce and Microsoft followed a less visible but equally important playbook. They built local enterprise-sales teams, partner networks and ways for Brazilian companies to buy and pay locally. Microsoft also used its existing enterprise relationships and product bundles to make adoption easier across the rest of its software ecosystem.

And OpenAI appears to understand the assignment.

Brazil is already OpenAI’s third-largest market by weekly users and its second-largest by number of API developers. But OpenAI has done more than translate ChatGPT into Portuguese.

It introduced ChatGPT Go for R$39.99 a month, roughly $8, giving Brazilian consumers a lower-priced option billed in reais. It partnered with Nubank to distribute ChatGPT Go to the bank’s customers. It has also opened a São Paulo office and is working with legal-tech startup Enter to develop a nationwide AI-literacy program for Brazilian legal professionals.

Brazil is too large to ignore.

But that size is precisely what allowed it to develop its own institutions, payment infrastructure, technology champions and consumer behavior. The central bank built Pix. WhatsApp became the default channel for life and business. Local companies built payments, logistics and compliance systems around realities that foreign companies still treat as inconvenient exceptions.

You cannot approach Brazil as a Spanish-speaking Latin American market that happens to speak Portuguese. And you definitely cannot approach it as the United States translated into Portuguese.

Getting Brazil right means rebuilding the product around the phones people use, the ways they pay, the taxes companies face, the regulations they operate under and the infrastructure the market requires. It means putting real decision-making power in the country and committing enough time and capital to build the pieces that do not already exist.

That requires far more than translating the interface and hiring a country manager. But the size of the market, and the revenue opportunity that comes with it, makes the effort worthwhile.

For companies operating across countries, moving money gets expensive and complicated fast. Every new market can mean another bank, another currency, another payment rail and another layer of reconciliation.

Jeeves is built to remove that complexity. Its stablecoin-native financial operating system brings payments, FX, corporate cards and treasury into one stack — allowing global companies to move and manage money across markets without rebuilding their financial infrastructure country by country.

For Orinter, one of Brazil’s largest B2B travel operators, the impact was 87% lower international transfer costs.

The less it costs to move money globally, the more capital you have to grow globally.

So if you're a founder, CFO or finance leader building across markets, stop building financial infrastructure country by country. Go to tryJeeves.com to see what a global financial OS can do for your company.

iFood - announced it will invest ~US$4.7B in Brazil through March 2027, 41% more than in its previous investment cycle.

The company will invest across restaurant operations, new delivery categories, proprietary technology and iFood Pago. More than US$388M will go into technology and innovation, including AI agents and a generative AI model developed with Prosus. iFood now serves ~65M users, works with 500,000 establishments and processes more than 180M deliveries per month. It expects businesses outside restaurant delivery - including groceries, pharmacies and pet products - to generate ~40% of its results by the end of the year.

→ iFood's ambitions now strech far beyond food delivery. It is using its scale and distribution to build a much broader commerce, logistics and financial-services platform - just as the Chinese competitors DiDi and Meituan arrive in Brazil with the same ambition.

Revolut - received a full banking license in Colombia and plans to invest US$62M ahead of its 2027 launch.

The company will initially offer deposit accounts, high-yield savings, several credit-card products and unsecured consumer loans. ~200,000 Colombians have already joined the waiting list. Revolut is also completing the acquisition of a bank in Argentina and already holds a payments license in Peru.

→ Revolut is not testing Latin America with a lightweight payments product. It is assembling regulated banking infrastructure across the region- and says it wants to become Colombia's third- or fourth-largest banking player within five years.

A5X - raised US$70M in one of Brazil's largest fintech rounds of

2026.

The Series D was led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Kaszek, with participation from XP, IMC, Jump Trading, Optiver, XTX Markets and ABN AMRO Clearing. The round values A5X at ~US$525M and brings its total funding above US$140M. The company is building a new derivatives exchange to compete with B3 and expects to begin operating in the second quarter of 2027.

→ A5X is not building another financial app on top of Brazil's existing rails. It is trying to introduce competition into the exchange and clearing infrastructure itself - and some of the world's most sophisticated financial institutions are backing the attempt.

Pagaleve - received authorization from Brazil's Central Bank to operate as a regulated payment institution.

The license allows the Pix-installment fintech to issue postpaid payment instruments and initiate payment transactions. Pagaleve previously depended on a partner to handle payment initiation; it can now bring that infrastructure in-house and has greater freedom to develop new products for consumers and retailers.

→ Pix installments are moving from a fintech workaround into a regulated financial product. Pagaleve's license gives it more control over the rails underneath its BNPL model just as banks and fintechs race to turn Pix into a serious alternative to credit cards.

Mundi - secured a credit facility of up to US$150M from Column to expand trade financing in Latin America.

The Mexican fintech provides working capital to companies involved in international trade by financing their accounts receivable. Mundi has financed ~US$2.5B in transactions for ~600 companies exporting to more than 50 countries, grew ~70% over the past year and has been profitable since early 2025. It plans to use the new facility to launch additional products

and explore expansion into Colombia and Argentina.

→ One of the largest fintech financings in Latin America was not an equity round. Mundi is another sign that private credit is becoming the capital layer underneath the region’s fintech economy - particularly in businesses where every new customer requires more funding, not just more software.

Listen - Michael Moritz on Invest Like the Best.

One of the best investor conversations I’ve heard in a while. Moritz explains why he spent decades asking founders about their childhoods, how a journalist with no technical background ended up running Sequoia, and the Steve Jobs profile that destroyed their relationship. Come for 40 years of lessons on investing and building one of the world’s greatest venture firms; stay for Moritz’s brutal honesty about ambition, obsession and why, after everything he has accomplished, he still struggles to feel proud of any of it.

Listen - Disney, Part II on Acquired.

Four and a half hours on Disney repeatedly pulling itself back from the edge—and how brutally difficult it is for a giant company to disrupt itself when consumer behavior shifts underneath it. Disney+ is the perfect example: Disney had to cannibalize the cable and theatrical model that built its empire to follow consumers into streaming, even though the new business could never replicate the economics of the old one. Come for the Eisner turnaround, ESPN and Bob Iger’s Pixar-Marvel-Lucasfilm acquisition spree; stay for a fascinating case study in what it actually takes to remain relevant through multiple tectonic shifts.

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