Lineup, the Uruguayan surf forecasting and live camera platform, has acquired WavesNow, one of Brazil’s largest beach camera networks. It is the company’s third acquisition in three years, following Argentina’s Freewaves in 2023 and Chile’s Buscaolas in 2025.
The deal takes Lineup from 144 to 231 live cameras, and from 10 to 97 in Brazil, across São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Rio de Janeiro and Paraná. The company also operates cameras in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.
South America has always been a hard market to serve from the outside. Distance, fragmentation and the physical work of keeping cameras running meant the region ended up building its own networks, country by country, run by locals. Lineup has spent three years bringing those networks together into a single platform. WavesNow is the third, and the one that takes the company into Brazil.
“Operating in this region takes local presence: people who know each beach and who are there when something breaks. That’s why every country built its own solution, each with its own strengths. We built the platform from scratch, and one of the ways we chose to grow was by bringing together networks that already existed rather than putting up cameras one by one in each market. WavesNow is the third, and it’s the one that gives us Brazil: the largest market inthe region and the hardest for us to reach from the outside. Today we run cameras in four countries and our own forecast in eight. That combination didn’t exist in the region, and it’s exactly what we set out to build,” said Fabián Fernández, CEO and founder of Lineup.
Fernando Knutz, co-founder of WavesNow, joins Lineup as COO Brazil and will continue to lead the local operation.
“Joining Lineup and leading the Brazilian operation in this new chapter will let us go much further. I decided to stay with the project because we see the future of this business in exactly the same way, and I know the potential of what we have built so far. Users will feel the benefits of this directly: the expansion of the camera network, a new wave forecasting service built by specialists, and a major improvement to the platform experience, combining the strengths of both companies,” he said.
The forecasting service Knutz refers to is Lineup’s own, covering roughly 520 spots across eight countries with four daily updates, backed by a team of four human forecasters: one in Argentina, one in Brazil, one in Chile and one in Uruguay. It is the only team of its kind in the region, and it is led by Brazilian forecaster Luiz Guilherme Aguiar, who spent more than a decade at Surfline before joining Lineup.
WavesNow subscribers will keep their service and will be migrated to Lineup’s platform, as happened with Freewaves and Buscaolas users in the previous acquisitions.
Lineup was founded in Uruguay in late 2021 and raised more than USD 500,000 from angel investors between 2022 and 2023. It runs on a freemium model, and the deal adds more than 65,000 registered WavesNow users.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
About Lineup Lineup is a surf forecasting and live beach camera platform founded in Uruguay in late 2021. It operates 231 owned cameras across Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, and provides forecasts for roughly 520 spots in eight Latin American countries, with four daily updates and its own team of local forecasters. It runs on a freemium model.
