San Francisco, September 2, 2026 — Yuno, the AI-native operating system of global payments and financial services and Nauta, the operational brain powering autonomous AI agents for global trade, brought together 160 developers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and students from Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil this weekend for NextWave Hackathon 2026.
Held simultaneously in Mexico City, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo, the 24-hour competition challenged 40 teams to develop AI and financial technology solutions with practical applications across industries. The event was supported by OpenAI, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Ecommerce Brasil, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Participants received access to OpenAI tools, technical mentorship, architecture reviews, and hands-on support from engineers and industry leaders throughout the weekend. At the end of the competition, the leading teams in each city presented their projects to a jury including Juan Pablo Ortega, Co-founder and CEO of Yuno, Valentina Jordan, CEO and co-founder of Nauta.
Team Oxen, representing Brazil, took first place with AgentPay, a solution that allows AI agents to make purchases on a person’s behalf without granting unrestricted access to their money. Agents gain the ability to execute transactions, while humans set the rules governing what they are allowed to spend. The winning team included Pedro Marcondes Dombeck Schott, Vinícius Ribeiro de Almeida Gorini, Rodrigo Araujo Rigotto, Thiago da Costa Araujo.
"Latin America’s AI and startup ecosystem has grown rapidly over the past two years, and we wanted this hackathon to showcase that momentum on a global stage," said Juan Pablo Ortega, Co-founder and CEO of Yuno. "The builders emerging in Bogotá, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City are working at the same level as their peers around the world, and it’s exactly the kind of talent we want building at Yuno too. Bringing 160 of them together for one weekend gave them the opportunity to show that the next wave of AI can be built anywhere."
Yuno engineers worked with the teams developing solutions across payments and financial services, drawing on the company’s experience building infrastructure used by enterprise merchants, banks, and digital wallets in more than 190 countries. Nauta served as a strategic partner, bringing experience in applying AI to complex operations across industries such as logistics, manufacturing, and financial services. Its engineers led architecture reviews throughout the weekend, helping teams turn promising demos into solutions designed for real-world use.
"Latin America is full of complex operational challenges that AI can help solve, as well as the talent to build those solutions," said Valentina Jordan, Co-founder and CEO of Nauta. "Over the past year, we’ve worked with U.S. companies to deploy agentic AI across real operational challenges, giving us firsthand experience at turning promising demos into solutions business can rely on."
NextWave began in Bogotá in December 2025 with 52 participants across 11 teams. The winning project, 4thena, consolidated sales signals from WhatsApp, Telegram, LinkedIn, and Slack into a searchable database that automatically generated product specifications. Less than a year later, the event has expanded to four of Latin America's leading tech hubs and more than tripled applicants, reflecting the region’s growing AI talent base and rising business demand for practical AI solutions.
About Yuno
Yuno is the AI-native operating system of global payments and financial services, powering the financial infrastructure of enterprise merchants, banks, and wallets. Through one API, Yuno connects them to payins, payouts, fraud prevention, KYC/KYB, and stablecoins at global scale, so they can operate everywhere through a single integration.
Agnostic by design, Yuno offers connectivity to 1,000+ payment methods and 460+ integrations in 190+ countries, optimizing acceptance rates, reducing costs, and strengthening security through specialized AI agents that learn from every transaction on the network. Global brands run their payments on Yuno, including McDonald's, NetEase Games, GoFundMe, inDrive, and Rappi. Banks, acquirers, PSPs, and wallets use Yuno to modernize their infrastructure without replacing core systems, and to prepare for the next generation of commerce, including agentic payments.
Learn more at y.uno.
About Nauta
Nauta is the operational brain powering autonomous AI agents for global trade, consolidating documents, tracking data, ERP inputs, and communications that are normally scattered across disconnected systems into one unified layer. That context is what lets Nauta's AI agents run operations end to end rather than stopping at a demo.
