While in the US everyone is talking about Halloween, in Latin America the scariest holiday on the calendar isn’t so popular, so people are already starting to see Christmas decorations in street stores and malls. And believe us when we say that it could be even scarier than any Halloween custom because it means that the end of the year is closer than we think. But it doesn’t mean that the business market is starting to slow down, it is just the opposite.

The market still moving at a fast pace in Latin America, only in Brazil this week we had two huge announcements. The first one was that the Brazilian fintech EBANX reached the $ 1 billion valuation and joined the Latin America unicorns club, and the second one was the recent $ 40 million Softbank’s investment in the Brazilian startup Olist. 

Well, now you might be thinking: “ok, I understand why a new unicorn is important, but why do I need to be aware of this Softbank investment? They are investing in Latin American startups all the time.” Yes, you are right, but EBANX and Olist have an important point in common that you are missing: they are located in Curitiba city, outside the Rio-São Paulo axis. As we already explained in detail in this article some months ago, with the booming startup landscape in the country, new “Brazilian Silicon Valleys” were born and Curitiba was among them. Even so, this is the first time that two startups that were born on one of these alternative tech-hubs won the unicorn status and it seems that the next ones are on the way. The opportunities are expanding, the society is changing and this is a thing that cannot definitely miss. 

READ ALSO: “Meet the Silicon Valleys of Brazil“

Meanwhile, on the global market, the Q3 results are the main topic of every media outlet and we obviously couldn’t resist taking a look at the latest announcements of companies that have all to do with Latin America. 

Get prepared to a breathtaking LABS+1 edition, full of the most surprising news on Latin American business market, and don’t forget to take note of our tip for the weekend:

4- Q3 results: Amazon is down, Microsoft and Snapchat is up

The time when all the global companies show us its lasts results is finally here again, the first Q3 results were already released and just two of them were enough to put fire on an old competition: Amazon is down, meanwhile Microsoft is up, it means that Jeff Bezos is no longer the richest man in the world and Bill Gates recovered its position. 

Although Amazon has exceeded expectations in revenue – reaching $70 billion, up 24% from 2018’s same quarter and against $68.8 billion estimated by the market – the company missed expectations concerning profits – and announced earnings per share of $4.23, vs. $4.62 per share that Wall Street was expecting. With the results, Amazon shares registered a drop of more than 6% in after-hours trading, reaching around $116 per share promptly after the earnings release.

On the other hand, Microsoft profits also outperformed analyst’s estimations – getting to $10.7 billion, while in the same period of last year the company had reached $8.82 billion. When giving a closer look, the major result was registered by the cloud computing business and the largest Amazon Web Services competitor, Azure, which reported 59% of revenue growth.

But these giants weren’t the biggest Q3’s surprise, the most incredible evolution came from Snapchat. After years of fighting against the Instagram competition, the social media app is on its second consecutive quarter with positive results. Snapchat reached $ 446 million total revenue amount during the period, which means a jump of 50% in a YoY analysis, besides reaching 210 million total users from which 7 million are active daily, an increase by 13% in relation to previous year same period, according to TechCrunch. 

3- AliExpress is putting efforts to make Double 11 popular in Brazil

The Chinese giant, which leads the ranking of international e-commerce stores in Brazil, will offer discounts of up to 70% to Brazilian consumers on November 11th. “We will ensure the lowest prices of the year”, revealed Ken Huang, the responsible for AliExpress’ operation in Latin America, in an interview for the Brazilian media outlet Valor Econômico. 

This is not the first time that AliExpress releases huge discounts for Double 11 in Brazil, but now the company is giving the first steps and putting efforts into making the promotional date truly popular in the country. To do this, AliExpress will count on the help of local partners, such as EBANX, the payment processing fintech that has recently become a Brazilian unicorn and has a long business history with the Chinese retailer in Brazil.

2- Brazilian startup Olist will receive more than $ 40 million from Softbank

Brazilian startup Olist, a virtual store that operates within marketplaces such as Mercado Livre and B2W, will receive more than $ 40 million from the Japanese investment fund SoftBank. The information was anticipated by Brazilian business news site NeoFeed. The company was valued at over $ 100 million.

In an interview with LABS, Tiago Dalvi, CEO at Olist, said that more than 30 funds were sought by the startup for this investment round, mainly from outside Brazil. According to him, it wasn’t just SoftBank’s smart money that attracted Olist.

Dalvi says that before closing the deal with SoftBank he talked to several other startups invested by the Japanese fund and realise that SoftBank really has what it takes to take Olist to the next leve–just as previous rounds with Redpoint eventures and Valor Capital did. “We had a summit with them. It’s really an amazing ecosystem.” 

Check it out the full interview!

1- EBANX is the new Latin American unicorn

A small cross-border payments startup, outside the Rio-São Paulo axis where all the big players were located, and trying to get its first big merchant: AliExpress. What is the chance of this plan to really work well? 

If we are talking about EBANX, 100% because it was exactly what happened in 2012 in the first huge step in the fintech’s journey. 

From that moment on, the company has been collecting several achievements, including the unicorn status and LABS interview Wagner Ruiz, EBANX’s CFO and co-founder to understand the details the journey of the Brazilian fintech that is shifting the entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem in southern Brazil. 

Check it out the full interview!

LABS +1: Women recall the Brazilian dictatorship

Forty years later, a group of women– including the former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff–revisits the Maiden’s Tower, the name by which the female wing of the Tiradentes Prison, where political prisoners were kept during the dictatorship, was known for. As the memories emerge, the audience gets to know what these women lived during the period.