Live Web Summit Rio

Generative AI, machine learning, open-source models. The impact of all these technologies can be as broad as the amount of data on the Internet. With so many possibilities and also uncertainties, how can we keep teams that work with these techs engaged?

In the case of TBD at Block and Zippi, two tech companies that work to make financial services more inclusive, the answer to that is straightforward: considering real people’s problems and the impact that new digital features can have on their lives.

This is what Emily Chiu, from TBD, and Ludmila Pontremolez, from Zippi, stated at the Web Summit’s panel “Leading through the AI era,” conducted by The Brazilian Report‘s deputy editor Fabiane Ziolla Menezes at the event’s center stage, on Wednesday.

Both panelists lead teams that develop solutions for a huge and critical issue: the barriers that many people around the world face when seeking credit and other financial products, simply because traditional banks do not have access to their information in order to assess the risk of operations. 

According to Ms. Chiu, close to a billion people, especially in the Global South, do not even have identity credentials. 

In the case of micro and small businesses, a problem arises, for example, when personal and business resources are managed through the same bank account, Ms. Pontremolez explained.

To face these scenarios, artificial intelligence can explore alternative data sources and understand behavioral patterns, in addition to improving customer support and internal productivity. 

The new digital solutions, of course, come with new challenges, as well as their own biases and dangers — another subject Fabiane Ziolla Menezes brought up for discussion. 

Check out the conversation in full below:

While discussing the global AI chip race at the center stage of Web Summit Rio this week, Marcio Aguiar, director of enterprise sales at Nvidia Brazil, said that the company is not interested in fighting for market share, but in opening new markets.

“That is why we also work side by side with Google, AWS, Microsoft, etc.” he said, referring to companies that have been creating their own microprocessors for generative AI, while using Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) in their cloud computing services. “All our platforms are compatible with them. It is what we call ‘coopetition.’ The biggest winners in this process are the customers.”

The company is preparing to launch a new generation of chips in the second half of this year. It seeks to meet the growing expectations of AI developers and researchers, a segment in which it has an 80 percent market share.

Many of Nvidia’s investments are currently focused on the biopharmaceutical industries, robotics, and what the company calls the “omniverse” — a platform through which it is possible to create digital twins, that is, virtual representations of infrastructures that operate as in the real world, using AI. “We’re having a lot of investments in developing platforms for drug discovery,” he said.

But it is in the race that came before AI that the company is about to make a new announcement in Brazil. Earlier this week, Nvidia announced a new supercomputer called “Venado,” installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The machine can accelerate atomistic simulations for material research and high-resolution astrophysical simulations.

According to Mr. Aguiar, Brazil is on the path of high-capacity computing investments. “Very soon, in the next few months, we will announce a major supercomputer plan for Brazil,” said the executive.

Investors smell desperation, but there is a way to increase your bargaining power, even if you really want someone to put money into your business. “Calendar density” is one of the keys, said Brian Requarth to The Brazilian Report‘s editor-in-chief, Gustavo Ribeiro. 

They held a panel on “What VCs [venture capitalists] don’t want you to know,” at Web Summit Rio 2024 on April 17. Mr. Requarth founded Latitud and VivaReal and has experienced both sides of this world, as a founder and an investor. 

According to him, lining back-to-back meetings during a two-week period, for example, and establishing hard stops for your meetings conveys an “aura” to investors, communicating that you are busy and have many options to get the best fit. 

Gustavo Ribeiro also asked him about issues such as what entrepreneurs tend to be excessively concerned with and what they should pay more attention to when trying to raise money. The impact of cultural differences on negotiations was also an interesting topic of the conversation.

In Mr. Requarth’s view, North American founders tend to be much more aggressive in their statements to VCs than Latin Americans. 

He thus gave a tip for the audience in Rio: “I’m not encouraging you to inflate anything, but be bold — and be grounded at the same time — but don’t be afraid to be audacious with your statements and what you’re going to achieve.”

Most investors, Mr. Requarth said, will probably assume that entrepreneurs are usually too optimistic, and will reduce the values they project by about 20 percent — something that can kill a proposal from someone too realistic. 

As he pointed out, VCs can easily notice when a founder is unrealistic. Being a grounded negotiator, however, involves considering that winning investors’ hearts and minds demands much more than hard numbers and projections. Start by “being likable,” advised Mr. Requarth.

Check out the conversation in full below:

During the opening day of Web Summit Rio today, TBD, one of four businesses at Block, formerly known as Square — the financial conglomerate co-founded by Twitter’s ex-CEO Jack Dorsey — officially announced the global availability of the first set of software development kits (SDKs) of its platform tbDEX. 

It is an open-sourced, decentralized messaging protocol aimed at enabling people and businesses to make transactions at significantly lower costs and across the globe, not only using legacy payment rails but also new transactional instruments, such as cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. “There is a lot of infrastructure to be built to allow bitcoin and other technologies to be used at a larger scale, as in payments. tbDEX is part of it, as it allows things to be traded in a trustworthy way,” says TBD CEO Mike Brock. 

To be effective, tbDEX has to be connected to local payment and transactional schemes, which has to happen through fintech companies also connected to TBD’s protocol. Mr. Brock announced TBD’s two first partner fintechs in Latin America: Bankaya, a Mexican app that offers digital saving accounts to over 1.4 million people, and Conduit, a U.S.-based API provider that helps businesses of all sizes to move money between Latin American and African markets and the U.S., among other locations, at scale. They are interested in building their transactional solutions on top of TBD’s new protocol. 

While Bankaya is primarily interested in connecting their previously underserved customers in Mexico to friends and family members in the U.S., for Conduit, which is focused on B2B transactions, one of the most pressing issues is predictability. 

“Today, a client contacted me to say they didn’t know where their money was. It was sent from Kenya through a Swift transaction but had not arrived at its destination in the U.S. Most of our work has to do with it, tracking transactions from end to end and avoiding extra charges from intermediaries, which often demands us to ‘manually’ interfere, that is, send an email to someone at a bank,” Kirill Gertman, CEO and co-founder of Conduit, describes to The Brazilian Report.

The startup also works with stablecoins, a much faster transactional option for businesses to move money than legacy rails. “The problem with stablecoins is another; it is related to the fact that banks often find them suspicious, but this can also be solved through TBD’s protocol,” explains Mr. Gertman. Currently in talks with at least three Brazilian banks, Conduit is working to build its local connections before connecting its services for Brazilian companies to TBD. 

As Mr. Brock explained, tbDEX uses decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs) to validate counterparty identity and trust securely. “If you don’t have an ID, you don’t exist, which is a big problem in financial services. We are trying to develop things holistically when we think about serving unbanked people. Having alternative ways to prove identity is key to truly decentralized systems,” explains Emily Chiu, COO at TBD. Despite calling Latin fintechs partners, Ms. Chiu recalled that TBD does not require formal partnerships. “Anyone can start writing with tbDEX; no permission is needed.”

For the second consecutive, The Brazilian Report team will take part in Web Summit Rio, not only covering the event but moderating three different panels. The event’s tickets are on track to sell out this afternoon.

On April 16, our co-founder and editor-in-chief, Gustavo Ribeiro, leads the panel “What VCs don’t want you to know,” alongside Latitud co-founder Brian Requarth. As we know by now, investors’ caution to startups in the last couple of years was not due to a lack of money but to pursuing more profitable and predictable portfolios. 

Gustavo returns on April 18 to moderate another panel, “Is the IPO market back in business?” at the center stage. After over two years in the doldrums, will 2024 be the year when initial offerings finally return? He will be joined by Fabiana Fagundes, founding partner at FM/Derraik, Marcello Gonçalves, managing partner at Domo.VC, and Ariel Arrieta, co-founder and managing partner at NXTP Ventures.

Many investment banks and analysts worldwide have already given the practical answer: yes. But does this year also represent a good opportunity for startups and tech-based companies to go public? That is one of the points to be explored in the talk.

From the founders’ perspective, finding the right investors is often more critical for the success of a business than the money itself. In this pursuit of a good match, Mr. Requarth, an experienced entrepreneur and investor, aims to help everyone attending by uncovering what VCs think and what they usually don’t tell founders. 

Between these two events, on April 17, deputy editor Fabiane Ziolla Menezes will join Emily Chiu, co-founder and COO of TBD at Block, and Ludmila Pontremolez, co-founder and CTO of Zippi, to moderate another panel at the event’s center stage, entitled “Leading through the AI era.” 

The purpose of this talk is not only to explain what these two prominent leaders are doing to make financial services more inclusive through AI-powered platforms but also to explain how they keep their teams on board with such challenging goals in such challenging times. 

If you can’t make it to Web Summit Rio this year, don’t worry; we’ve got you covered. You can follow our event’s coverage on our special (and paywall-free) Web Summit Rio live blog, as well as across all our subscriber-only products, from daily newsletters to more in-depth articles published on our website.

About BRL 30 million (USD 6 million) disbursed by private companies and non-profitable institutions is how Rio de Janeiro got to host the first Web Summit outside of Europe in 2023 — and will remain host for the next five years. 

The amount is practically half of what the Portuguese government agreed to pay (USD 12.8 million) per year back in 2018, when the main event moved from Dublin to Lisbon, setting a ten-year commitment to the city. The event helped turn the Portuguese capital into a European tech hub and “wants to do the same for Rio de Janeiro,” according to Artur Pereira, country manager for Web Summit in Brazil.

Since Lisbon started hosting the event, the flow of venture capital to Portuguese startups increased twenty-fold, from an annual average of EUR 30 million between 2010 and 2015 to EUR 500 million (USD 572.7 million) in 2018 and EUR 1.5 billion in 2021. Investment dropped in 2022 to EUR 710 million due to the current lower level of global liquidity.

The main partners of Web Summit Rio were Latin America’s largest corporate investment bank, Itaú BBA, blockchain company Transfero, and Senac-RJ, a local institution that provides professional education focused on the trade of goods, services, and tourism. Senac-RJ is linked to Fecomércio-RJ, Rio de Janeiro’s state trade federation.

Antonio Florencio de Queiroz Junior, chair of Fecomércio-RJ and this year’s ambassador for Web Summit Rio, tells The Brazilian Report that Senac-RJ committed up to BRL 20 million to Invest.Rio, the city’s innovation agency. 

“But Senac-RJ did not reach this limit because Fecomércio-RJ itself, in addition to Sebrae [another organization focused on fostering micro and small businesses] also paid part of the hosting rights, in addition to the private companies,” said Mr. Queiroz. 

Senac-RJ has committed to an investment of BRL 18 million with Invest.Rio, encompassing not only Web Summit but also future projects aimed at fostering innovation.

The local administration estimates that the event will generate BRL 1.2 billion for the local market over its six editions — almost a third of what Carnival moves annually. This year alone, it expects visitors to have spent BRL 66.9 million in the city.

“The most important thing, however, is the strategic quality of the public that the conference will bring to Rio. The world already sees Rio as a leisure destination; it will start to see it as a key place to do business, too,” says Chicão Bulhões, Rio’s municipal secretary of economic development and innovation.

Itaú BBA declined to inform how much it invested in Web Summit. We couldn’t locate Transfero’s communications team. 

Web Summit as part of a broader plan

Bringing Web Summit to Rio is part of Mayor Eduardo Paes’ larger agenda aiming to transform Brazil’s tourism capital into its tech capital, too. A vital part of this plan is a project called “Porto Maravalley” (a portmanteau of Porto Maravilha, Rio’s former dock region that is being revitalized, and Silicon Valley).

Since November 2022, the municipal government has invested nearly BRL 40 million in the renovation of a set of old warehouses in Porto Maravilha, turning them into a 10,000 square meters technology center capable of housing up to 400 startups. 

The Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics, a research and education organization linked to the Science and Technology Ministry, plans to occupy half of the Porto Maravalley and launch its first free higher education course, which will be offered to students from other states and regions of the country who perform well in the Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad.

This old port region of Rio and the city center have new urban rules that allow the construction of taller and mixed buildings, mixing commercial and residential functions, as a way to revitalize the area. That, combined with Porto Maravalley, should attract at least 13,000 residents. 

On top of that, tech companies wanting to set up shop in Porto Maravilha will pay a lower rate for the municipal tax on services — 2 percent instead of 5 percent. 

The city expects the work to be concluded and the project to be launched in the second half of this year.

On Thursday, the last day of Web Summit Rio, Mr. Paes said at a press conference that the city will launch public investment in the coming days to directly foster local startups and tech companies.