VC Firm Upload Ventures Trades Credit FinTechs for AI Investments

Brazilian investment firm Upload Ventures is reportedly upping its artificial intelligence (AI) investments while avoiding credit FinTechs.

That’s according to a Bloomberg News interview Wednesday (Sept. 11) with Carlos Simonsen, co-founder and managing partner of the venture capital (VC) firm.

“There are a lot of opportunities in AI as a productivity facilitator in several processes in sectors such as banking and health care, but agritechs and credit fintechs have a lot of risk,” he said.

“There will be no more Nubanks,” Simonsen added, referring to the Latin American FinTech giant, which has more than 100 million customers.

According to Bloomberg, Upload has two funds in the investment phase, a $120 million fund focused on early stage companies, and one for more established companies that has $200 million in committed capital.

“We try to buy stakes in local tech firms that can become global or businesses aiming to have a very big presence in Latin America,” Simonsen said.

Among its investments is an AI-powered retail media platform called Topsort, the report said. That company is looking to expand in Latin America by providing an auction engine for online marketplaces and retailers with multiple brands.

Bloomberg noted that these investments are happening as high interest rates in Latin America and the U.S. have dampened investors’ appetite for venture capital. VC investments in Latin America came to $1.8 billion for the first half of 2024, down from a peak of $9.3 billion during the last six months of 2021, the report said.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS has examined how AI is both an attractive investment for VC firms, but also a tool for these firms to make wise investment decisions.

The technology can rapidly analyze vast amounts of data on startups and market trends, thus helping VCs identify the most promising opportunities and make better decisions about where to allocate their funds, PYMNTS wrote in the spring.

“The usefulness of AI in venture capital is about augmenting human capabilities with machine intelligence to sift through the noise and identify genuine opportunities with precision,” Steve Brotman, the founder and managing partner of growth equity firm Alpha Partners, told PYMNTS.

“With AI, we can analyze market trends, startup performance metrics, and other critical data points at a scale and speed that’s simply unattainable for a team of human analysts alone,” he added. “This improves efficiency and fundamentally enhances the ability to make informed, strategic decisions by providing a depth of insight into potential investments that were previously unimaginable.”