Who Founded Nu Holdings Ltd.?

Nubank was founded in 2013 by David Vélez, Cristina Junqueira, and Edward Wible in São Paulo, Brazil. Vélez, a Colombian-born Stanford MBA and former Sequoia Capital partner, had been tasked with establishing Sequoia's Brazil office but was told in October 2012 that the firm was abandoning the expansion. Rather than return to California, Vélez decided to start his own company. His motivation came from personal experience: as a foreigner in Brazil, he found opening a bank account bureaucratic and expensive, and he saw an opportunity to use technology to make banking accessible. Vélez recruited Junqueira, a Brazilian engineer and former Itaú Unibanco credit card executive who had run Itaú's largest credit card division, and Wible, an American software engineer and former Francisco Partners associate with limited operating experience but extreme technical capability. The trio started work in a dingy suburban house in São Paulo, with Wible living upstairs. Their first product was a no-annual-fee credit card managed entirely through a smartphone app — a radical concept in Brazil, where banks charged high fees for basic services. The product launched on April 1, 2014, after a regulatory change that would have forced Nubank to shutter if not launched by that date. Initial customer acquisition was slow: university students showed little interest, preferring cards with airline miles. But a glowing review from a niche online publication triggered viral growth, and a waitlist strategy — created because the team couldn't handle demand — made the purple card an aspirational product. By the end of 2014, Nubank had hundreds of thousands of customers. The company expanded its product portfolio over the following years: digital accounts (2017), personal loans (2019), investments through NuInvest (2020), insurance (2021), and SME banking (2024). International expansion began with Mexico in 2019 and Colombia in 2020. The company reached 48 million customers by its December 2021 IPO on the NYSE, which raised $2.6 billion at a $9 per share price and valued the company at approximately $41-45 billion. The IPO made co-founder Cristina Junqueira one of only two self-made female billionaires in Brazil. Post-IPO, the company focused on profitability, achieving its first annual net profit in 2023 ($1.03 billion) and nearly doubling it in 2024 ($1.97 billion). The 2024-2025 period has seen the company expand into secured lending, high-income banking (Ultravioleta), and non-banking verticals including travel and telecommunications.