The business story
David Vélez (born 1981, Medellín, Colombia) is the co-founder and CEO of Nubank. A Stanford-educated former Sequoia Capital partner, he was sent to Brazil to build a venture practice, ran into the dysfunction of the country’s banking oligopoly, and in 2013 founded Nubank with Cristina Junqueira and Edward Wible to attack it. Its no-fee, phone-first purple credit card grew into a full digital bank serving more than 100 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. Nubank listed on the NYSE in 2021 (~$41bn), drew a $500M Berkshire Hathaway investment, and reached its first full-year profit in 2023. Vélez is the richest person in Colombia and a Giving Pledge signatory.
Before Nubank
David Vélez was born in Medellín, Colombia, in 1981, and spent part of his childhood in Costa Rica during the cartel-era violence; his family had its own entrepreneurial streak. He went on to Stanford, where he studied management science and engineering as an undergraduate and later returned for an MBA at the Graduate School of Business.
His early career followed a familiar finance path: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, the growth-equity investor General Atlantic, and then a partnership at Sequoia Capital. Sequoia sent him to Brazil around 2011 to build a Latin American investing practice. That project was eventually shelved, partly because the firm judged the local technical talent too thin to back. He found no company worth backing, but he saw a market that frustrated nearly everyone who used it.
Building Nubank
The frustration was personal. By his own account, opening an ordinary bank account in São Paulo took repeated branch visits over several months, security checkpoints, heavy paperwork, a steep monthly fee and an offer of credit at rates above 400% a year. He read that experience as evidence of a concentrated industry, with a handful of large banks holding most of the market, earning high margins and facing little pressure to improve.
In 2013 he founded Nubank in São Paulo with two partners who covered his blind spots. Cristina Junqueira brought credit-card and banking experience from Itaú, along with the regulatory knowledge an outsider lacked. Edward Wible, an American engineer, built the technology. The first product, released in 2014, was intentionally narrow: a purple Mastercard credit card with no annual fee, run entirely from a phone app.
From that starting point the company widened into accounts, debit, lending, investments and insurance, expanded into Mexico and Colombia, and passed 100 million customers by 2024. Investors included Sequoia, Tencent, DST Global and Tiger Global, and Berkshire Hathaway put in $500 million before the December 2021 NYSE listing, which valued Nubank at roughly $41 billion. The company lost money in 2020 and 2021, then recorded its first full-year profit in 2023 and about $2 billion of net income in 2024.
