Everyone’s talking about this week’s crypto rally. Almost nobody’s watching DeepSeek, China’s budget darling, just hike prices by up to 1,100%.
Hard data: Colombia’s startup ecosystem reached 2,295 active companies and $857 million in investment during 2025, growing 24% year over year — triple the Latin American average — per the 2025-2026 Colombia Tech Report from KPMG and BBVA Spark. Fintech captures 19% of that capital, followed by SaaS (11%) and healthtech (7%). Why it matters: 89% of that capital is still concentrated in Bogotá, while Medellín — home to a quarter of the companies — gets just 6.2%. And only 17% of Colombian startups are raising venture capital; the remaining 80% operate at early stages. In parallel, the first edition of DistritoLAB (Colombia Tech Week, August) closed with 376 startups applying and roughly $3.1 million placed among Demo Day finalists. The real takeaway: the opportunity isn’t chasing the “booming ecosystem” headline — it’s identifying where capital hasn’t arrived yet, by geography and stage, before it does.
China moves the market again — this time it’s the price, not the launch
On July 17, China’s Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3 — the largest open-weight model ever released — and it set off a replay of the “DeepSeek moment”: Taiwan Semiconductor fell 7%, SoftBank 9%, and the Nasdaq 100 lost 1%. The reason: K3 beat several benchmark Western models on independent tests while charging $15 per million output tokens, versus $50 for its closest competitor. “China’s AI ecosystem is probably a lot better than people thought,” said Paul Triolo of DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. The practical implication: for anyone evaluating AI vendors — including your own financial decision process, something we explored in this column — the decision criteria can no longer be performance benchmarks alone; it has to include cost per token, because that’s where China is winning the conversation.
Bitcoin is up 23.7% on the week and people are already calling it a confirmed bull market
The noise: Bitcoin rose 23.7% on the week and Ethereum 31.4%, brushing up against $79,100 and $2,507 respectively — headlines are calling it confirmed bull-market territory, with the $80,000 resistance level ready to break.
The signal: CoinShares’ own read is more cautious. Per James Butterfill, the firm’s head of research, whales “stopped selling and went back to accumulating, though not yet at levels that suggest an imminent breakout” — cautious accumulation, not euphoria. And the catalyst the market is pricing in — the Fed holding off on further hikes — still depends on what Jerome Powell says this week at Jackson Hole, an event that hasn’t happened yet. The real takeaway: the rally is genuine, but calling it “confirmed” before Jackson Hole is getting ahead of the signal, not reading it.
“China’s AI ecosystem is probably a lot better than people thought.”
— Paul Triolo, DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, following the Kimi K3 launch (July 17, 2026). A month later, DeepSeek hiked prices by up to 1,100%: even China’s disruptors now charge for their edge.