Show me the margins

There’s a reason I started The J Curve in Latin America.

I wanted to prove that breakthrough technology stories shouldn’t be defined by a handful of zip codes in Northern California. Talent and ambition are everywhere. Billion-dollar problems are everywhere. And some of the most interesting companies solving them were being built in Latin America — I wanted the rest of the world to see that too.

It’s funny because I live between these two very different worlds. I’m a Stanford GSB alum and spend a lot of time around what’s being built in Silicon Valley, while TJC puts me in rooms with founders building across Latin America.

Silicon Valley is busy living in the future — autonomous vehicles, data centers in space and under the ocean, next-generation compute.

In Latin America, you can still build businesses worth tens of billions of dollars by solving surprisingly basic problems: how people get paid, how businesses move money, how companies manage employees, how financial infrastructure works across borders. The basic plumbing businesses depend on every single day.

And honestly, I find driving that change just as exciting as sending rockets into space.

Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to companies that take problems everyone has learned to live with and ask:

Why does it still work this way?

And then build something materially better.

That’s a big part of why I’m so excited to welcome iFood Benefícios and Jeeves as partners of The J Curve.

Both are taking huge, historically clunky parts of running a company and rebuilding them around technology and a much better user experience.

iFood Benefícios is taking benefits from an administrative obligation and turning them into part of how companies attract, engage and retain people — leveraging the technology, food expertise and ecosystem behind Latin America’s largest food delivery app to make those benefits materially more lucrative to employees, helping them get up to 40% more value from the same benefit balance.

Jeeves is attacking the fragmented financial infrastructure for enterprises operating across borders — bringing stablecoin payments, FX, corporate cards, AP and treasury into one stack so companies can move money faster, reduce the cost and complexity of operating across markets, and actually have visibility and control over their team and finances.

And on a personal level, it’s pretty incredible to see what TJC has become.

I started TJC from my apartment in NYC during Covid with a cheap microphone and Zoom.

Five years later, some of the companies we set out to tell the world about are now our partners.

I’m incredibly proud of that — and equally conscious of the responsibility that comes with it. We put our audience front and center, and we want every partnership to bring them something really useful: better products, new opportunities and companies we believe are worth knowing.

Very excited to have iFood Benefícios and Jeeves with us on this wild ride as technology reshapes Latin America. Vamos!

Five years ago, the formula for building a venture-backed company in Latin America was pretty clear.

Pick an enormous consumer market. Find something that worked in the U.S. or China. Localize it for Latin America. Subsidize adoption. Grow GMV as fast as humanly possible. Expand across the region. Raise again in twelve months. Profitability could wait.

In 2021, that playbook produced some of the largest rounds Latin America had ever seen.

Rappi raised $500 million. Merama raised $345 million. Daki raised $260 million. Facily raised more than $500 million across multiple rounds.

Facily was almost a caricature of the era. Take a proven foreign consumer model. Subsidize growth. Chase enormous GMV. Raise huge rounds on that growth. Build the infrastructure and headcount for the next round. Repeat.

Fast-forward to 2026 and the playbook is almost its exact opposite: vertical over horizontal, B2B over consumer, economics over GMV, depth over geographic expansion.

The venture archetype went from Rappi and Facily to Enter automating Brazilian legal work and Pax selling intelligence software to police departments. You don't even need to look at the funding data to see the shift. Just look at the headlines. What founders and investors chose to celebrate in 2021 versus what they celebrate today tells you almost everything about how

the definition of a great venture-backed company has changed.

Capital efficiency is now a selling point 

We collected the verbatim published headlines for Latin American funding announcements in both periods—46 from 2021 and 63 from 2026, copied character for character rather than summarized—and scored each on what it leads with and which language appears anywhere in it.

The shift is pretty striking.

Three frames that dominated the last cycle have largely disappeared.

The unicorn frame is gone.

In 2021, the word “unicorn” appeared in 17.4% of headlines, or 21.7% if you include the wonderfully 2021 euphemism “gets its horn.” In seven cases, becoming a unicorn was effectively the news itself:

“Clip Becomes Mexico’s Fintech Unicorn.”

“Mercado Bitcoin Becomes Brazil’s First Crypto Unicorn.”

“Nuvemshop se torna unicórnio, após investimento de R$ 2,6 bilhões.”

Across 63 headlines in 2026, the word appears once—in a Bloomberg piece describing Kavak as an existing unicorn. Not one company announced becoming one.

The valuation-as-story frame largely disappeared with it.

In 2021, 30.4% of headlines led with either a valuation or a unicorn milestone. In 2026, that number is 9.5%.

Valuation hasn't stopped mattering. If anything, the reluctance to disclose it tells you that it still matters enormously. After the correction, plenty of companies are raising below, around or not dramatically above their previous marks. Making that number public can turn a perfectly good financing into a story about a markdown.

So when valuation does make the headline today, it's usually because the number itself makes a point: Plata at $5 billion. Ualá at $3.2 billion. Enter at $1.2 billion as the region's first AI unicorn.

Across the full 2026 dataset, only 8.8% of rounds disclosed a valuation at all.

The Silicon Valley analogy disappeared completely.

In 2021, these comparisons were routine. Belvo was “LatAm’s answer to Plaid.” Nuvemshop was “LatAm’s answer to Shopify.” Kavak was memorably described as what would happen “if Spotify, Amazon, Toyota and Citibank had a kid.”

In our 2026 sample: zero.

And the comparison class has become increasingly internal to the region.

When Greenoaks’ Neil Mehta announced Decade’s $85 million seed, he didn’t explain the opportunity through a U.S. analogue. He started with Nubank: “A decade ago, Brazilians paid some of the highest banking fees in the world. Nubank changed that for tens of millions of people, but investing never got its turn.”

The benchmark stopped being San Francisco and became São Paulo.

But the more interesting shift isn’t what disappeared.

It’s what replaced it.

In the 46 articles from 2021, searching for profit, breakeven, margin, unit economics or payback produces zero headlines and only nine mentions in the body copy. Most are qualifications or promises about the future:

“The company is not profitable as it’s focused on growth.”

“Ottati said the company is not yet profitable.”

“A very clear horizon to profitability.”

The phrase “payback period” doesn’t appear once.

In 2026, companies are increasingly using exactly those metrics to sell the round.

Addi announced its financing after eight consecutive profitable quarters.

Kavak disclosed its first full month of consolidated global profitability alongside its $300 million round.

Somos Internet published a 13-month customer payback period against an industry average of roughly five years.

Memed, Bliss, Elevify and Uncover all disclosed breakeven while raising.

Across the broader dataset, at least 16 companies disclosed profitability, breakeven or a margin figure at the moment of raising. And 75.7% of all rounds disclosed some form of operating or traction metric.

This is the real break from 2021.

In 2021, a Series A founder talking extensively about breakeven could almost sound like they weren’t thinking big enough. The expectation was that venture capital existed to buy growth now and economics could follow later.

In 2026, showing that the machine works is increasingly part of the fundraising pitch itself.

Valuation used to tell you how much investors believed the company could become worth.

Now founders increasingly lead with evidence of what the business has already become.

Revenue. Margins. Payback. Profitability. Named customers.

And that isn’t simply a change in PR strategy.

It’s a consequence of a much bigger change in how companies are being built—and what founders can assume happens after the round.

But the headlines are only the surface. The bigger shift is in what actually gets built—and what no longer gets funded at all.

That’s next week.

And if you haven’t read Part 1 of our research on Brazil vs. Mexico funding, it’s a must-read.

Mercado Libre — just completed 30 consecutive quarters of 30%+ YoY revenue growth, an unprecedented streak among public companies.

Q2 revenue hit a record $10.2B, up 50% YoY, while its credit portfolio grew 75% to $16B. Net income reached $466M despite aggressive investment in free shipping, logistics and credit. Mercado Libre has now sustained 30%+ annual revenue growth for 7.5 straight years, while growing into one of Latin America’s largest companies.

→ The law of large numbers apparently doesn’t apply to Mercado Libre.

Yuno — raised $45M to build the AI-native operating system for global payments.

Now connects 1,000+ payment methods and 460+ integrations across 190+ countries, with customers including McDonald’s, inDrive, GoFundMe, NetEase Games, Whoop, Crypto.com and Rappi. The round was led by Global PayTech Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Kaszek, Monashees, QED and others. Its new Payments Concierge lets merchants manage payments in natural language, with the longer-term bet that AI agents will eventually operate those payment flows autonomously.

→ Yuno started by connecting fragmented payment infrastructure. Now it wants AI agents to operate it.

Ume — raised R$500M (~US$93M) through Brazil's capital markets to scale its credit engine.

Ume provides the infrastructure for retailers to offer and operate their own credit products, handling underwriting, technology, servicing and collections. The new R$500M financing gives it significantly more firepower to fund that credit without financing the loan book through a giant venture-equity round.

→ Brazil's fintech growth engine increasingly isn't venture capital. It's the domestic debt market.

Watch — Ted Lasso.

Very late to this party, but completely hooked. Come for the British football, stay for what might accidentally be one of the best shows about leadership, culture and building high-performing teams.

The J Curve has reached the point where we need another builder.

We're looking for a Content & Distribution Manager to help us turn every episode into a world-class content engine across YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, X and our newsletter.

If you've ever wanted to build a modern media company from the inside—and care deeply about storytelling, distribution and quality—we'd love to meet you.

Role description and application: Click Here

We launched The J Curve referral program.

Two milestones. Two rewards built for founders.

Refer 3 founders → Unlock the masterclass

Share The J Curve with 3 founders and get access to How to Build a Brand That Raises Money — my complete framework on storytelling, audience building, distribution, and investor relationships.

You’ll also get the exact 30-day execution sprint I would follow if I were starting from zero today.

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Refer 5 founders and unlock a 30-minute 1:1 fundraising and deck review with me.

We’ll go through your pitch deck, positioning, fundraising narrative, and investor messaging. I’ll tell you what’s working, what’s missing, and where I’d focus to make the story more compelling.

(Please send your deck at least 48 hours before the call.)

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Thanks for reading,

Olga 

🎙 The J Curve  is where LATAM's boldest founders & investors come to talk real strategy, opportunity and leadership.