Unico, the Brazilian identity-verification company, has agreed to acquire Valida, an Argentine provider of facial-biometric identity checks, Bloomberg reported on September 10, 2026. Unico signed the agreement on August 27 and expected the deal to close in September.
Unico declined to disclose the price or other financial terms. It plans to keep Valida's current team, and Valida will gradually start operating under the Unico brand over the coming months.
One of Valida's founders, José Rolandi, who previously served as deputy chief of cabinet in Javier Milei's government, will become Unico's general manager in Argentina. Unico also plans to open an office in Buenos Aires in January 2027 to serve as a regional hub for technology talent.
What Valida built
Valida sells digital identity validation and biometric authentication for customer onboarding and log-in, using a customer's face to confirm who is opening an account or signing in, a check banks use to stop account fraud. Its clients include Argentine banks Galicia, Banco Nación, Banco Provincia and Banco Macro, among other financial companies.
According to Bruchou & Funes de Rioja, the law firm that advised Valida's shareholders, its platform has carried out more than 25 million identity validations and holds a 50% share of Argentina's banking sector. Marval O'Farrell Mairal also acted as legal counsel on the transaction.
“A decisão está centrada em nossa estratégia de expansão regional e no valor que vemos neste mercado”
Why Unico is buying
Unico was founded in Brazil in 2007 and provides facial-biometric identity verification and fraud prevention. More than 400 companies in over 20 countries use its services, it says. It is backed by SoftBank, Goldman Sachs and General Atlantic and was valued at $2.6 billion in a 2022 funding round.
Rafaela Provensi, Unico's head of global operations, said Valida stood out because its products fit Unico's existing offer and many of its clients operate in several Latin American countries. Argentina will join Brazil and Mexico as Unico's main regional bases, and the company is in advanced commercial talks in Colombia and Peru. Provensi said further expansion would not necessarily require more acquisitions.
Unico aims to raise transaction volume in the Argentine business by about 60% from Valida's current level within a year. Its identity-verification volume grew 84% year on year in the first quarter of 2026, and volume in Mexico rose 204% compared with the last quarter of 2025, the company said.
A buyer on an acquisition run
Valida is the latest in a series of purchases by Unico. In 2024 it bought Mexican identity-verification startup Trully.AI and Oz Forensics, a biometrics company based in the United Arab Emirates, and in 2025 it acquired Israeli passwordless authentication company OwnID.
Unico plans to hire technology staff in Argentina, especially engineers to work on its global products, though it has not set a target. The deal comes as Milei's government tries to attract foreign investment; Bloomberg noted that technology employment in Argentina has stalled over the past year as exchange-rate policy made labour more expensive.
Why identity fraud is driving deals
Artificial intelligence has made sophisticated identity fraud cheaper and easier to carry out, raising demand for tools that can tell real users from synthetic or manipulated ones. Fake identities account for 48% of fraud cases in Latin America, the highest share in the world, according to a cybercrime report by LexisNexis Risk Solutions cited by Bloomberg.
Consolidation among Latin American identity providers has picked up in 2026. Earlier in the year, credit bureau Serasa Experian bought Brazilian identity-verification startup idwall. Valio Ventures, which tracks regional technology deals, counted the Unico–Valida purchase among 19 Latin American tech acquisitions in September 2026.
Valio noted that only two of those 19 deals were cross-border purchases within Latin America, and both targeted Argentine companies. Most acquisitions in the region that month were domestic, with buyers staying inside their own countries.
