Why U.S. Firms Are Buying Up Emerging Markets' Most Specialized Startups

A quiet but accelerating shift is underway across the Latin American startup ecosystem, and U.S. buyers are a driving force behind it. (Credit: Latin Times)

When Anthropic, most recently valued at $965 billion USD, acquired AI biotech startup Coefficient Bio in a $400 million USD deal in April, it signaled something beyond a single deal: a wider repositioning among U.S. tech giants toward buying specialized expertise rather than building from scratch.

Nubank made the same calculation when it bought Hyperplane, a U.S.-based AI firm, to get its machine-learning capabilities up to speed across three markets at once.