Argentina’s Cocos Capital Buys Warren to Break Into Brazil

Argentina · Companies

An Argentine challenger is planting a flag in Brazil. Cocos Capital, a fast-growing investment app from Buenos Aires, has agreed to buy the core assets of Brazilian broker Warren in its first move outside its home market.

The deal, reported by NeoFeed and Brazil Journal and confirmed through market sources, gives Cocos a ready-made foothold in Latin America’s largest financial market. Warren manages more than twenty billion reais, roughly four billion dollars, on behalf of its clients.

For a company that did not exist five years ago, it is a striking leap. The purchase still needs sign-off from regulators before it can complete.

Who is Cocos Capital

Cocos Capital was founded in 2021 by Nicolás Mindlin and Ariel Sbdar. Mindlin’s family controls Pampa Energía, one of Argentina’s biggest power producers, where he spent years as a finance chief.

The app lets Argentines invest, trade currency, pay and use debit cards from their phones. It has grown from nothing to about two million customers and more than two billion dollars in assets, with a team of only two hundred people.

Unusually, the founders built it without raising outside capital. They put in a small amount of their own money and funded expansion from the cash the business threw off.

That self-funded growth gives the deal its logic. Argentina is a promising but small market, and the founders have spoken of building a company with global ambitions.

Why Cocos Capital chose Brazil

The reasoning, according to people close to the talks, is simple. Brazil has the most developed capital market in the region and by far the biggest pool of potential customers.

Buying Warren is faster than building from scratch. The deal brings a brokerage aimed at institutional clients, an asset-management arm and a capital-markets unit that arranges share and debt sales.

Warren itself was created in 2017 by former partners of XP, Brazil’s dominant investment platform. It had spent the past year looking for a strategic partner before agreeing to sell.

Rising costs of compliance and regulation had made life harder for a mid-sized independent broker. Joining a larger, well-capitalised group looked like the safer path.

The most valuable piece is Renascença, an institutional brokerage Warren bought in 2021 that generates much of its revenue. That gives Cocos an immediate pipe to Brazil’s big investors rather than only retail savers.

Warren had raised close to a hundred million dollars across several funding rounds since 2017. It reached break-even in 2023, but scale in Brazil’s crowded brokerage market proved harder to win than early backers hoped.

What the deal signals

The structure is telling. It is mostly an exchange of shares, with a small cash component that lets venture funds cash out, among them Singapore’s sovereign fund, Citi Ventures and the regional investor Kaszek.

Warren’s five founders are not joining Cocos. They plan to launch a separate technology venture, keeping some assets and part of the team.

For investors watching the region, the direction of travel matters more than the price. This is Argentine money moving into Brazil, rather than the usual flow of capital arriving from outside Latin America.

It echoes a recent bet by Brazil’s BTG Pactual on a Colombian fintech: regional players expanding across borders into neighbours they know well. A confident Argentine firm choosing Brazil is also a quiet vote of confidence in the maturity of its market.

The timing fits a wider shift. After years of capital controls at home, Argentine financial firms are looking outward again as President Javier Milei‘s government loosens currency rules and reopens the economy.

What is Cocos Capital buying?

Cocos Capital is acquiring the main assets of Warren, a Brazilian investment platform with more than twenty billion reais, about four billion dollars, in client custody. The package includes an institutional brokerage, an asset-management business and a capital-markets unit that arranges share and debt offerings.

Why does the deal matter beyond Brazil?

It is the first international expansion for Cocos Capital and a rare case of Argentine capital moving into Brazil. The choice signals that a fast-growing regional fintech sees Brazil’s deep capital market as its biggest opportunity, mirroring other cross-border bets by Latin American financial firms.

Is the acquisition final?

Not yet: the transaction still requires regulatory approval before it can close, and the financial terms have not been disclosed, though sources describe the structure as mainly a share swap with a small cash portion to give Warren’s venture-capital backers a partial exit.