Itaú to Buy AI Start-Up NeoSpace for R$2.925bn

Itaú Unibanco, which Bloomberg describes as Latin America’s largest bank by assets, has agreed to buy NeoSpace, a Brazilian start-up that builds large AI models for financial services, for R$2.925 billion. Reuters put that at about $589 million, at an exchange rate of 4.9654 reais to the dollar.

The bank announced the deal on Monday 26 October in a material fact filed with Brazil’s securities regulator, the CVM. Itaú will buy all of NeoSpace’s shares. Part of the price is due when the deal closes and the rest will be paid over five years, “subject to certain conditions”, the filing says. It does not give the split.

In brief

Itaú Unibanco has agreed to buy all of NeoSpace, a Brazilian start-up that builds foundation models, for R$2.925 billion, with payments spread over five years.
NeoSpace has worked for Itaú for nearly two years, training models on the bank’s own data for credit, customer relationships and fraud prevention.
The deal needs approval from Brazil’s competition authority, CADE, and the central bank.

What NeoSpace does for the bank

NeoSpace describes itself as a builder of “large foundation models of data”, according to Itaú’s filing. Foundation models are the big, general-purpose AI systems on which chatbots and other tools are built. Rather than training on the open web, NeoSpace has spent nearly two years building models for Itaú that are “trained with Itaú’s own data”, the bank says, so they can be applied to its customers and products.

Itaú says that work has produced “relevant and transformative results” in credit, customer relationship management and fraud prevention. The technology will also feed ia.i, the bank’s generative AI assistant, which it wants to give more personalised financial guidance and credit offers. The bank says NeoSpace will keep running independently, with its team in place. Bruno Pierobon, its founder, stays as chief executive, Valor Econômico reported.

Itaú already knew the company well before Monday. The bank invested $15 million in NeoSpace for a 15% stake in early 2025, according to Exame, citing Bloomberg Línea.

In a statement published by Valor, Pierobon said the partnership had meant “applying foundation models to real challenges in the financial system and proving their potential at scale”. Itaú’s chief executive, Milton Maluhy Filho, said the bank wants to be among the institutions that “will define the next chapter of the global financial industry”. “Brazil has already shown its ability to set international benchmarks in banking innovation, and we have the opportunity to raise that bar with frontier artificial intelligence,” he said. Both quotes are TSN translations from Portuguese.

The deal is not done yet. It needs prior approval from Brazil’s competition authority, CADE, and from the Banco Central do Brasil, as well as other usual closing conditions, the filing says.

A bank is buying the model maker, not renting one

Many banks get their AI by paying for access to models built by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or others, and adding their own data on top. Itaú is choosing to own the people and models instead. The price says it values that control highly: R$2.925 billion for a start-up that, by Bloomberg Línea’s account, was founded in 2023 and raised an $18 million round in early 2025.

That fits a pattern of buyers paying for teams that already know their data. Meta has just bought Sundial, whose founders had worked at Meta, and Zoom bought Onyx for its enterprise search. In Itaú’s case the buyer is not a tech company but a lender, and the data is customers’ financial lives.

Owning the models brings responsibility with it. Regulators expect banks to answer for the AI they use in credit decisions and fraud checks; the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has just reminded firms that they stay responsible for the AI tools they use against financial crime. Brazil’s central bank, which must approve this deal, may look at the same question. The state is spending too, with a R$959 million AI supercomputer tender due to take bids on 4 November.

The five-year deferral is the detail to watch: how much of the R$2.925 billion depends on NeoSpace’s models keeping their promise is still unknown.