Itaú to Acquire NeoSpace for R$2.925 Billion

The agreement is set out in a Material Fact that Itaú Unibanco Holding S.A. filed on Form 6-K on 26 October 2026 (opens in a new tab), signed in São Paulo by Investor Relations Officer Gustavo Lopes Rodrigues. The buyer is named as the Company and/or its affiliates, which the filing defines together as Itaú. The target is NeoSpace A.I. Technologies Ltda., and the agreement covers all shares issued by NeoSpace. Itaú is therefore acquiring the whole company.

What NeoSpace does

The filing describes NeoSpace as a Brazilian artificial intelligence startup specialized in the development of foundational models trained on large-scale datasets. A foundational model is trained once on a broad base of data and then specialised for individual tasks, which is different from building a separate model for every question. NeoSpace describes its own platform (opens in a new tab) in the same terms: self-supervised learning builds a persistent understanding of each entity’s behaviour, and one specialisation per question, such as churn, fraud or demand, sits on top of the same foundation.

That approach matters for a bank because the raw material is already in the building. The filing says NeoSpace has been providing services to Itaú for nearly two years by developing models trained on Itaú’s proprietary data. Those models enable the large-scale application of generative artificial intelligence in the development of solutions for Itaú’s businesses and clients, including increasingly personalized financial and credit management solutions.

What Itaú says it gains

Itaú states that the combination of NeoSpace’s capabilities with Itaú’s data, expertise and scale will create the conditions required to develop increasingly specialized models and expand their application across Itaú’s various products and services. It also describes the transaction as directly aligned with the continued development of ia.i, Itaú’s generative artificial intelligence assistant, enhancing the personalization of customer experiences and Itaú’s ability to provide interactions and solutions that are increasingly tailored to each client’s needs.

Itaú’s filing says the acquisition strengthens the ongoing relationship between NeoSpace and Itaú, which has already delivered significant and transformative results in areas such as credit, CRM (customer relationship management), and fraud prevention. Valor International (opens in a new tab) adds that during this period the companies developed generative artificial intelligence solutions for applications in credit, financial management, customer relations and fraud prevention.

Three of those areas sit at the centre of retail and commercial banking. Credit decisions depend on how well a bank understands each customer’s circumstances. Customer relationship management depends on knowing which conversation or offer is relevant to which person. Fraud prevention depends on recognising behaviour that does not fit. Each is a data problem at very large scale, and each is where a foundational model trained on a bank’s own data has the most to offer.

The link to ia.i

The filing links the transaction directly to the continued development of ia.i, Itaú’s generative artificial intelligence assistant. Valor International says NeoSpace’s technology is also expected to help advance ia.i, enabling personalized services, financial guidance, and credit offers tailored to customers’ profiles. In practical terms, the assistant that customers talk to and the models that learn from their data are now part of one organisation’s roadmap.

The Material Fact states that the purchase price for the acquisition will be BRL 2.925 billion. Valor International puts the figure at R$2.925 billion, and a trade report (opens in a new tab) puts it at about $588.6 million. The dollar figure moves with the exchange rate, so the Brazilian real amount in the filing is the fixed reference for the deal.

The filing describes the price as comprising an installment payable at closing and the remaining installments deferred over a five-year period, subject to certain conditions. The payment profile therefore has two parts: a first payment when the transaction completes, and a series of later payments spread across the five years that follow.

The payment schedule

The schedule runs for five years after closing. The first installment is paid when the transaction completes, and the later installments follow over the five-year period, subject to the conditions the filing describes.

Conditions to closing

The filing states that closing is subject to the approvals of certain conditions precedent, including prior approval by the Brazilian Antitrust Authority (CADE) and the Central Bank of Brazil, as well as other customary conditions applicable to transactions of this nature. Valor International lists the same two approvals.

1. 1.Itaú signs the Share Purchase Agreement for all shares of NeoSpace (signed, 26 October 2026).
2. 2.CADE, Brazil’s antitrust authority, gives its prior approval.
3. 3.The Central Bank of Brazil gives its prior approval.
4. 4.Other customary conditions are satisfied.
5. 5.The closing installment is paid and ownership of NeoSpace transfers to Itaú.
6. 6.The remaining installments are paid over the five-year period.

NeoSpace’s own site (opens in a new tab) describes a platform built for companies that have billions of events a day and need to turn raw event streams into real-time decisions. It calls the approach Large Data Models, a class of model built for massive-scale, heterogenous enterprise data rather than only text or images. The data platform is called NeoData, and the model layer is NeoLDM, which combines pre-training on the raw sequence of events, one post-training head per question, and calibrated inference on incoming events.

The design choice the company emphasises is training once and covering every question. Self-supervised learning builds a persistent understanding of each entity’s behaviour, and each business question then gets its own specialisation on top of the same foundation. NeoSpace says this removes the fleets of single-purpose models and the pipelines that go with them, and that its systems handle billions of rows and petabytes of enterprise data, structured and unstructured, modelled together in one system.

Built for regulated work

NeoSpace states that every dataset is profiled, versioned and monitored before a single training step runs, covering nulls, schema and distribution, and that this makes the process auditable end to end, which is what a regulated operation needs. The company also lists SOC 2 and GDPR compliance, along with governance with advanced access control. For a bank, those are the qualities that make an external model-building partner suitable for sensitive customer data.

The acquisition follows an earlier investment. LatamList (opens in a new tab) covered the round on 4 February 2025: NeoSpace raised an $18M round led by Itaú. Itaú invested $15M, and four angel investors invested the remaining $3M. As part of that round, Itaú received 12 months of exclusive use of NeoSpace’s conversational AI and perpetual exclusivity for co-developed products.

The round gave NeoSpace capital to grow, and it gave Itaú the exclusivity described above. LatamList notes that NeoSpace planned to use the funds to expand its offerings beyond financial institutions and enter international markets, and its co-founder Felipe Almeida set out that ambition in a direct statement.

The filing states that NeoSpace’s management and business operations will remain autonomous from the Company, and that its current team will be retained, ensuring the continuity of its activities and operations. Valor International adds that NeoSpace will retain independent management and operations under the leadership of Bruno Pierobon, who will remain CEO, and that the agreement provides for the retention of the startup’s team and the continuation of its research and development activities.

Itaú CEO Milton Maluhy Filho framed the transaction in terms of ambition. He said the bank wants to be among the institutions that will define the next chapter of the global financial industry, and set out why the acquisition fits that goal.

He went on to describe what the acquisition is intended to deliver, placing it within the bank’s broader plans for customers and for growth.

Three public milestones ahead

The announcement points to a clear sequence of milestones. The first is the approval process, with prior approval from CADE and the Central Bank of Brazil required before closing. The second is closing itself, when the first installment is paid and Itaú takes ownership of NeoSpace. The third is the continued development of ia.i and of the credit, customer relationship and fraud prevention models that NeoSpace has built with Itaú. Each is a public, observable step.