Top 10 AI Startups to Watch in Uruguay in 2026

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Eldes
• ABTesting.ai
• BrainLogic AI
• Pooshlo
• Tell Toolkit
• Bunker DB
• MetaBIX Biotech
• Locbio
• Zapia AI
• Horizon
• The Tasting Continues
• Frequently Asked Questions

Eldes

The startup nobody discusses at South Summit is quietly solving a problem that affects 460 million people globally. Eldes uses a standard webcam and computer vision to detect hand and face movements, providing instant feedback to students learning sign language. No expensive hardware, no in-person instructor required - just a browser and a camera. It is the most accessible sign language tutor ever built from Montevideo.

Founded by Martín Alcalá Rubí, who also co-founded the AI consultancy Tryolabs, Eldes won the GIB 2025 Startup Challenge and operates entirely on local grants. Total funding sits under $200,000 - a shoestring even by Uruguayan standards. Yet the addressable market is staggering: the hearing-loss population in Latin America alone numbers in the tens of millions, concentrated in regions where physical sign language schools simply do not exist. Eldes scales where infrastructure cannot.

This is a classic Uruguayan bootstrap story. It will not raise $10 million or file for an IPO. But as F6S's directory of Uruguayan AI companies notes, such lean, mission-driven startups are the backbone of the local ecosystem. If Eldes captures even 1% of the LATAM hearing-loss population, that is 4.6 million users - a compelling acquihire target for a larger edtech or accessibility platform. The score on the card says #10, but the story says something else entirely.

ABTesting.ai

The most capital-efficient startup on this list does not chase venture dollars or build for local customers. ABTesting.ai fully automates landing page optimization: its AI suggests headline and CTA variations, runs the tests, and deploys the winner without human intervention. Founder Franco Morales, an alumnus of Montevideo's developer ecosystem, built a pure SaaS export machine. Pricing starts at $99 per month for small teams and scales to $999 per month at the enterprise tier - roughly a third of what competitors like VWO and Optimizely charge.

The numbers tell a lean story. ABTesting.ai has raised approximately $500,000 from local angels - enough to reach break-even. The company is profitable and growing at roughly 15% month-over-month, serving clients globally from its base in Uruguay. According to F6S's directory of Uruguayan AI companies, it represents a growing class of low-touch software exporters that require no local sales presence to win global customers.

This is the blueprint Uruguay needs more of - not every startup must be a deep-tech moonshot. Uruguay XXI has documented how the country's stable business environment and bilingual talent pool enable exactly this kind of capital-efficient, globally scalable product company. ABTesting.ai proves that a founder with a laptop in Montevideo can compete with Silicon Valley giants on price and performance, without ever leaving home.

BrainLogic AI

The generative AI gold rush has produced hundreds of chatbot clones, but few are built for the infrastructure that actually runs Latin America. BrainLogic AI understood this early. Its product, Zaplo, lives inside a WhatsApp-like interface and does what most AI assistants cannot: it integrates with regional payment services, ride-hailing APIs, and prepaid phone recharge systems. It books appointments, pays utility bills, and tops up Antel accounts - all without the user leaving the chat.

The company raised approximately $1.2 million from SNR and four other investors. The team brings experience from global tech firms but remains anchored in Montevideo's engineering community. Zaplo is currently live in Uruguay and Colombia, with expansion into Argentina and Peru underway. As F6S's directory of Uruguayan AI companies notes, BrainLogic AI is frequently cited as a leader in the local generative AI space.

The Latin American virtual assistant market is crowded with generalists who treat every user the same. Zaplo's focus on utility over conversation - actually completing transactions rather than just answering questions - sets it apart. If the company lands a partnership with a major telecom like Antel or Claro, its user base could explode overnight.

LatamList's profile of Uruguay's tech ecosystem highlights why this matters: the country's small population, high smartphone penetration, and strong trust in digital services make it the ideal sandbox for building LATAM-first products. BrainLogic AI is using that sandbox not to chase Silicon Valley's tail, but to build a platform designed for the region's 700 million consumers - one WhatsApp message at a time.

Pooshlo

The influencer marketing industry has a dirty secret: fake followers and bot-driven engagement drain billions in wasted spending annually. Pooshlo attacks this problem directly. The platform uses computer vision and behavioral analysis to verify that shares and reposts come from genuine human actions, not automated scripts. Brands pay only for real engagement. No fake metrics. No inflated reach. Just verified attention.

Founded by Andrés Puppo and Charly Alzate, Pooshlo operates from Punta del Este, which is rapidly emerging as Uruguay's second tech hub alongside Montevideo. The company is live with approximately 50 brands and 5,000 micro-influencers, primarily in Uruguay and Argentina. It is targeting $500,000 in seed funding from regional VCs to capture a slice of an estimated $1.3 billion LATAM influencer market.

Uruguay's tech ecosystem has historically been B2B-heavy - enterprise software, consulting, and nearshore development dominate. Pooshlo represents a deliberate bet on consumer-facing products that can scale regionally from a small domestic base. As Uruguay XXI notes in its coverage of the Punta Tech Meetup, the country is actively positioning itself as a launchpad for startups tackling Latin American-scale problems. Pooshlo's model - verified, transparent, AI-driven - is exactly the kind of product that could graduate from Punta del Este's beaches to boardrooms across São Paulo and Mexico City.

Tell Toolkit

The most terrifying diagnosis in medicine arrives too late. By the time Alzheimer's symptoms become obvious, the brain has been deteriorating for years. Tell Toolkit is changing that timeline with nothing more than a voice recording. Users speak into a phone or computer for 30 seconds, and the platform's NLP models analyze vocal biomarkers - pitch variation, word retrieval pauses, and prosody patterns - to detect early signs of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's long before traditional symptoms emerge.

Led by Fernando Slamovitz, with researchers from Universidad de la República (UdelaR), the company has raised approximately $800,000 in seed funding from SF500 and local investors. The platform is already being piloted in three rural Uruguayan clinics where access to neurologists is virtually nonexistent. As F6S's directory of Uruguayan AI companies notes, Tell Toolkit specifically targets these underserved regions where clinical access is limited.

The economics are as compelling as the science. Traditional Alzheimer's diagnostics - PET scans, spinal taps - cost $3,000 or more per patient. Tell Toolkit's voice analysis costs under $10. Uruguay has one of the oldest populations in the Americas, making it the natural proving ground. The company is in active talks with Uruguay's Ministry of Health for a national rollout.

If the pilots succeed, the addressable market becomes staggering. Uruguay XXI has documented how the country's stable regulatory environment attracts health-tech innovation - and Tell Toolkit could leap from rural Uruguayan clinics to Brazil's 200 million-person healthcare system. This is healthcare AI at the frontier: deeply human, economically rational, and built in a country that knows how to punch above its weight.

Bunker DB

Marketing analytics is a crowded graveyard of good ideas buried by bad data. Bunker DB took a different bet: obsess over data hygiene before the AI does anything. The platform ingests information from dozens of channels - Google Ads, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn - and uses machine learning to detect patterns that human analysts routinely miss. Which creative variants actually drive conversion? Which audiences are oversaturated? Where is the budget quietly burning? Bunker DB answers all three in minutes, not weeks.

Founded by Avedis Boudakian, the company raised approximately $3.5 million in seed and Series A funding (~$140 million UYU) from regional investors. The platform already serves major Latin American brands, including an unnamed top-5 Brazilian bank and one of Mexico's largest retailers. Customers report an average 23% improvement in marketing ROI. As Seedtable's ranking of Uruguayan startups notes, Bunker DB is frequently compared to competitors based in Buenos Aires, but reviewers consistently cite the Uruguayan team's focus on data structure as a decisive advantage.

Revenue sits at an estimated $2 million ARR with 40% year-over-year growth. The company is expanding into the U.S. market by leveraging Uruguay's free zones like Zonamerica, which offer nearshore advantages that make American clients comfortable. The differentiator is boring but defensible: clean inputs produce clean outputs. In a world where most marketing AI is garbage-in, garbage-out, Bunker DB has built a moat out of data discipline. It is the startup that wins by refusing to skip the washing-up.

MetaBIX Biotech

The next pandemic will likely emerge from a livestock barn, not a wet market. MetaBIX Biotech is building the early warning system. The company's SaaS platform integrates air sampling, molecular data, and AI models to detect zoonotic disease spillover in animal production facilities before the pathogen jumps to humans. Think of it as a smoke detector for the 75% of emerging infectious diseases that originate in animals, according to the WHO.

Founded by Laura Macció and Andres Abin, MetaBIX operates from the Pando Science and Technology Park, a hub that pairs Uruguay's century-long agricultural expertise with frontier computational biology. The company has raised approximately $2.3 million (~$92 million UYU) from AIR Capital and Dalus Capital. It is already active in Uruguay, Brazil, and Ecuador, with expansion into India underway - a market where livestock density and zoonotic risk converge at scale.

MetaBIX sits at a rare intersection of AgTech, biotech, and climate resilience. As Uruguay XXI notes in its analysis of the country's emerging AgTech ecosystem, this convergence of traditional agricultural strength and modern AI capability is precisely what positions Uruguay as a global hub for food-tech innovation. F6S's directory of Uruguayan AI companies highlights MetaBIX as one of the few companies globally combining molecular biology with real-time machine learning for outbreak prediction.

If the India expansion succeeds, MetaBIX transforms from a promising regional startup into a platform for global animal health monitoring. That is the quiet bet of this list - that the company predicting the next crisis from a small lab in Pando might matter more than any consumer app in Montevideo.

Locbio

While most AI startups optimize landing pages or analyze marketing data, Locbio is rewriting the operating system of life itself. The company has developed a patented computational procedure that designs proteins capable of sensing specific molecules and triggering precise cellular responses. Essentially, they build switches and circuits for living cells - a technology that could power applications in diagnostics, agriculture, and industrial biotech that we cannot yet imagine.

Founded by Dayana de los Santos and Felipe Trajtenberg, with support from the Institut Pasteur de Montevideo, Locbio has raised approximately $1.5 million from a combination of government grants, ANII funding, and private investors. The team holds patents filed in both the United States and Europe. More importantly, they have published in Nature and Cell - academic credibility that translates directly into investor confidence for deep-tech ventures. As F6S's directory of Uruguayan AI companies notes, Locbio is positioned as a fundamental technology provider for the regional biotech explosion.

Uruguay has historically exported commodities - beef, soy, cellulose. Locbio represents something different: an export of capability. The ability to design biology from first principles, to program proteins the way a developer writes code. Uruguay XXI has highlighted how the country's stable regulatory environment and strong university system create the conditions for exactly this kind of frontier science. Locbio is not a startup you will see in the consumer press. It is a foundational technology play that, if it scales, could transform how we diagnose disease, engineer crops, and manufacture materials - all from a lab in Montevideo.

Zapia AI

Latin America runs on WhatsApp. Over 700 million people across the region use the messaging app for everything from family chats to business transactions - yet the platform has never been an operating system. Zapia changes that. The AI assistant lives entirely inside WhatsApp, where users send a text or voice message - "Pay my electricity bill," "Book a dentist appointment," "What is the traffic on 18 de Julio?" - and Zapia handles it end-to-end, integrating with local payment systems and service providers without the user ever leaving the chat.

Founded by Juan Pablo Pereira, Nicolas Loeff, and Juan Olloniego, Zapia has raised approximately $7.3 million (~$292 million UYU), including a $5 million round from Silicon Valley investors. The platform already has over 500,000 active users across Uruguay, Argentina, and Colombia. As Yahoo Finance reported on the company's latest funding, Zapia is the first personal AI assistant designed specifically for Latin American users' daily needs - not a general-purpose bot translated into Spanish.

The approachable table wine of this list, Zapia competes with generic AI assistants but wins through localized relevance. It knows how to pay a UTE bill, recharge an Antel phone, and navigate Montevideo traffic because it was built for those specific rails. Paula Bellizia of AWS has highlighted Uruguay's unique ability to strategically adopt generative AI - and Zapia is the proof. It takes a global technology and adapts it to the infrastructure that actually defines regional life. Expansion into Mexico and Brazil is expected by late 2026.

Horizon

Traditional organizational consulting moves at the pace of an aging vintage: you interview twenty people, commission a 100-page report, and by the time it reaches the CEO's desk, the organization has already shifted. Horizon eliminates that lag entirely. The platform's NLP engine ingests thousands of conversations across Slack, WhatsApp, and email - detecting operational inefficiencies in minutes rather than months. It answers brutally honest questions like "Why is the product team on fire?" and "Which manager is quietly driving attrition?"

Co-founded by Nicolás Scopesi and Nicolás López, both with deep roots in Montevideo's engineering community and Universidad de la República, Horizon raised a $3.5 million seed round (~$140 million UYU) led by NXTP Ventures. As Gunderson Dettmer noted in its coverage of the funding announcement, the company is already expanding rapidly into the U.S. and São Paulo, targeting mid-market tech firms with pricing at $15,000 per year per organization.

Horizon solves a problem that has plagued consulting for decades: insights delivered too late are just expensive history. Michael Cusumano, an MIT Sloan professor who has studied Uruguay's innovation ecosystem, calls this the country's "judo strategy for innovation" - using small size and agility as an advantage against lumbering competitors. fDi Intelligence's profile of Uruguay as a haven for LatAm tech founders echoes this theme. A small team in Montevideo using lean resources to solve a global problem better than McKinsey or BCG is not a disadvantage - it is precisely the point. The score says #1, but the story is about a different kind of leadership entirely.

The Tasting Continues

The bodega is still open. The next vintage is being poured. Whether you join as a founder, an engineer, or a student taking that first course, the invitation stands: taste the story behind the score.

Frequently Asked Questions