Messaging has become the primary way people communicate with businesses across the Americas, yet the actions that actually move money still happen elsewhere. Payments, identity checks, credit applications, and signatures are routinely pushed into apps, portals, or call centers, creating friction, abandonment, and operational cost. Jelou was built to close that gap by turning conversations into execution. Today, the company announced a $10 million Series A to expand Brain, its platform for building AI agents that securely execute real business and financial operations inside WhatsApp.
The round was led by Wellington Access Ventures, with participation from Krealo, Credicorp’s corporate venture arm, and Collide Capital. Jelou has now raised $13 million in total funding, including a $3 million Seed round led by Act One Ventures and Arca Continental Ventures.
The timing reflects a broader shift in how businesses interact with customers. Conversational channels like WhatsApp have become the default interface across Latin America, yet most AI tools remain limited to answering questions rather than completing transactions. At the same time, enterprises face rising pressure to reduce operating costs, improve conversion, and deploy AI that can integrate with existing systems without introducing security or compliance risk. Jelou’s approach focuses on execution, enabling AI agents to move work forward inside the conversation instead of handing it off to fragmented tools.
Jelou’s core product, Brain, is a platform that allows businesses and developers to create and operate AI agents that connect directly to their existing systems and perform transactional operations inside chat. Through Brain, companies can deploy agents that communicate with customers over WhatsApp, collect missing information, verify identity, trigger payments, and advance financial workflows using live system data. The platform includes a web-based studio with more than 3,000 integrations for building and integrating agents, as well as a conversation management layer that allows teams to oversee high-volume interactions while securely executing workflows such as payments, credit processes, and document signing.
The company’s journey began in Ecuador in 2017, where founder Luis Loaiza and the Jelou team observed that messaging had become the dominant interface for commerce in the region, while execution remained fragmented and insecure. Drawing on more than a decade of experience building messaging and encrypted communication systems, the team set out to make chat a place where real business happens. Since then, Jelou has expanded across Latin America, processing more than $100 million in financial operations and serving over 500 business customers across more than 13 countries, including banks, retailers, and consumer goods companies.
Jelou’s traction reflects a broader trend toward conversational commerce and agent-driven operations. As AI adoption accelerates, businesses are discovering that automation only delivers value when it is tightly integrated with existing infrastructure and designed for production from day one. In regions like Latin America, where companies must operate across diverse regulations, payment rails, and systems, the ability to deploy secure, scalable AI inside familiar channels is becoming a competitive necessity.
Looking ahead, Jelou plans to expand Brain into a full operating system for conversational business, enabling companies and developers to build, deploy, and manage production-ready WhatsApp applications directly from a prompt. The company’s vision is to make WhatsApp the primary operating layer for businesses across the region, with Jelou providing the platform that powers everything built on top of it.
Elon Musk Is Likely In Deep Trouble As Grok Is Under Investigation By The EU
Posted in Commentary with tags EU, Grok, Twitter on January 26, 2026 by itnerdIt sucks to be Elon Musk. He’s already been slapped by the EU for not adhering to the Digital Markets Act, and he’s been under fire for the fact that his AI chatbot Grok creates content that is objectionable content. Here’s how that played out:
That takes us to today. The EU has clearly had enough with Elon’s antics and have opened an investigation into Grok and Twitter/X:
The European Commission has launched a new formal investigation against X under the Digital Services Act (DSA). In parallel, the Commission extended its ongoing investigation launched in December 2023 into X’s compliance with its recommender systems risk management obligations.
The new investigation will assess whether the company properly assessed and mitigated risks associated with the deployment of Grok’s functionalities into X in the EU. This includes risks related to the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, such as manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material.
These risks seem to have materialised, exposing citizens in the EU to serious harm. In light of this, the Commission will further investigate whether X complies with its DSA obligations to:
It’s a safe bet that this will not end well for Elon because when you mess with the EU, the EU tends to make life miserable for you. And it will also be a safe bet that Elon with whine and moan about how unfair this is. But let’s face facts. Elon created this situation by his cavalier attitude towards common decency. And as a result, this very troubled man is likely now in the “find out” phase.
Like I said at the start of this, it sucks to be Elon Musk.
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