Tiger Global, Seqouia, and Khosla Ventures invested in a lot of Brazilian fintech and neobank startups in the early/mid 2010s the same way they did in Indian fintech and what became IndiaStack in the early 2010s, and China's equivalent in the late 2000s.
YC has also been very active in the space in both markets by the late 2010s.
A lot of the work around Pix is largely thanks to the fact that neobanks like Nubank have become very competitive in the Brazilian market, and helped set higher consumer and business expectations for transaction processing and management.
VC investments are for private solutions to build likes of Alipay in India. These are govt. initiatives to ensure no one party gets monopoly on core infrastructure of the nation.
Microsoft is doing, what they do best.
Find things most users using or want to use, that's what they have done with WSL.Then do that with MS branding.
Now trying to attract Chrome's userbase.
I've come to realize that there are two camps here: those who appreciate SQL's structure and those who like the left-to-right ORM navigation of relations.
I do have to admit that it is awfully convenient to use a REPL to write a long chain query using an ORM. I do often run into limitations, and knowing that the solution in plain SQL is so simple is very annoying. The idea is to allow convenient composition, but following the structure of SQL rather than parent-children navigation so there aren't paint-yourself-in-a-corner cases.