AI Salon Rio #16

Inside the Term Sheet: What VCs Are Backing in Brazilian AI The next $100 billion company in Latin America will be AI-native, said Julio Vasconcellos (Altlantico). We couldn't agree more. There’s just one small problem: so far, Brazil has produced exactly one AI unicorn: Enter. So… where are the others? For this edition of AI Salon Rio, we’re sitting down with the people who see the companies before the rest of us do: the VCs. And not exactly newcomers. Astella has been investing in Brazilian tech since 2008 (backed companies like Omie and RD Station, acquired by TOTVS). NXTP has been investing in Latin America for 15+ years (backed Nuvemshop; first check into Auth0, acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion). We’re bringing Edson Rigonatti, co-founder and General Partner at Astella, and Clara Braga, Investment Analyst at NXTP, to the table to understand what they are actually funding in AI right now. Both invest early. Which means they are looking at companies when the future is still mostly a pitch deck. What kinds of AI-native companies are they seeing? What gets a second meeting? What gets killed in the first ten minutes? And, perhaps most importantly for us: do carioca founders need to move to São Paulo to become unicorns? (the Made in Rio team has opinions.) AGENDA 18:30 | Check-in & Networking 19:00 | Welcome Remarks a.k.a Luana's pep talk 19:10 | Startup Pitches Clustter; co-founder Gustavo Rosental Foli; founder Cláudia Alvim Neofuturo; founder Messias Barbosa 19:20 | Visagio is unveiling VisagioX at AI Salon Rio. Our founding partner Visagio is launching something new!! VisagioX is its new product innovation and venture-building arm, created to turn the problems companies are facing into products, platforms and, potentially, entirely new businesses (this one is special for us. Few people believed in AI Salon Rio earlier, or more, than Visagio did.). 19:30 | Inside the Term Sheet: What VCs Are Backing in Brazilian AI Clara Braga; investor at NXTP (ex- Evercore M&A