David Vélez

It took David Vélez roughly five months and five branch visits to open a bank account in Brazil, past bulletproof-glass doors and rude staff.¹ He concluded that the country's banking oligopoly, then about five banks holding roughly 80 percent of the market, could be taken apart by a company willing to do the exact opposite.

Nubank, the São Paulo bank he founded in 2013 and still runs as founder, chairman and chief executive, operates without physical branches and offers fee-light credit cards, deposit accounts, personal loans, insurance and investment products across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. Its listed parent is Nu Holdings. By customer count it is the largest digital bank and fintech platform in the world.

Background

Vélez was born in 1981 in Medellín, Colombia, into an entrepreneurial family: his father owned a button factory, and his paternal aunts and uncles all ran their own businesses. His childhood coincided with the drug-war violence that gripped Medellín through the 1980s and 1990s. After an uncle was kidnapped, the family relocated to Costa Rica when Vélez was about nine years old, and he holds both Colombian and Costa Rican citizenship. His Stanford Graduate School of Business profile credits the early instability with teaching him to be perceptive and focused. He earned a bachelor's degree in management science and engineering from Stanford University in 2005 and an MBA from Stanford GSB in 2012.

Getting started

Vélez began his career on a finance track, working in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, then in growth equity at General Atlantic, before joining Sequoia Capital as a partner around 2010 to 2011. Sequoia's head, Doug Leone, tasked him with scoping a Brazil office, and in 2012 Vélez moved to São Paulo. In October 2012, Sequoia decided to shelve its Brazil expansion, citing weak local pitches and a shortage of local software engineers; Vélez has noted that São Paulo's top university had graduated only around 42 computer-science students the prior year.¹

The founding insight came from personal experience. The account ordeal dated to around 2008, when Vélez was working at a private-equity fund and tried to open one as a foreign professional; the frustration crystallized a thesis that the oligopoly was ripe for a technology-first, fee-light, customer-focused challenger. Nearly two dozen industry experts warned him against it, pointing out that foreign incumbents such as Citibank and HSBC had already failed trying to enter Brazilian banking.¹ To cover his own gaps as a foreign outsider, Vélez recruited two co-founders: Cristina Junqueira, a Brazilian former head of Itaú's largest credit-card division, and Edward Wible, an American Princeton computer-science graduate and former Sequoia colleague. The company was founded in May 2013 in São Paulo.

What he built

Nubank launched with a no-annual-fee credit card managed through a mobile app, its purple card nicknamed the "roxinho." Vélez and early employees used themselves as the first customers. Seed funding came from Sequoia Capital and Kaszek Ventures in 2013, followed by a long sequence of rounds that raised roughly 2.3 billion dollars before the company went public. A June 2021 round of 750 million dollars, led by Berkshire Hathaway and Sands Capital, valued it at 30 billion dollars. On December 9, 2021, Nu Holdings listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NU, raising about 2.6 billion dollars at 9 dollars a share, with a first-day valuation of roughly 45 to 52 billion dollars, making it one of the most valuable financial institutions in Latin America.²

The customer base grew from about 12 million in 2019 to 48 million at the time of the IPO, 80 million by 2023, and 131 million across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia by the fourth quarter of 2025, including 113 million in Brazil, where it became the largest private financial institution by customer count. For its 2025 fiscal year, Nubank reported record quarterly revenue of 4.9 billion dollars, an all-time-high quarterly net income of 895 million dollars, and a 33 percent return on equity. Nubank also published "nuFormer," a foundation model trained on more than 100 billion transactions.

How he operates

Vélez describes Nubank's central operating idea as "consumer obsession," saying he wants customers to love the company "fanatically," an approach he has explicitly modeled on Amazon and studied through visits to Zappos and Disney.¹ He has said that behind the entire product and strategy "lies actually a very simple insight, which is people want to have business with companies that treat them well." The approach is that of a founder pulled by one specific broken system, Brazilian banking, who then rebuilt it methodically rather than routing around it. A defining internal story, which Vélez has recounted on Sequoia's Crucible Moments podcast, involves Nubank discovering that some customers had become more profitable only because the company forgot to send a payment-due reminder; rather than exploit the lapse, Nubank apologized and reversed the fees.¹ Vélez says he treats employees as owners and partners and emphasizes radical transparency, including telling staff the truth during a funding scare.³ He frames the mission as fighting complexity to empower people, and says the name "Nu" derives from the Portuguese for "naked," signaling stripped-down simplicity. On regulation, he has said Nubank wanted to be "the kid in the front row of the class."³

Where things stand

As of early 2026, Vélez remains founder, chairman and chief executive, with Nu Holdings trading on the NYSE. Nubank is expanding in Mexico, where it recently secured banking approval, and in Colombia, where it has more than four million customers, while continuing to dominate Brazil. The company states an ambition to evolve into a global digital banking platform over time. Vélez holds roughly a 20 percent stake in Nu Holdings with his wife through a holding vehicle, appears on the Forbes and Bloomberg billionaire indices, and resides in São Paulo.²

Key facts

• Born in Medellín, Colombia, in 1981; his family relocated to Costa Rica after an uncle was kidnapped.
• His own five-month ordeal opening a Brazilian bank account seeded the thesis for Nubank, founded in May 2013.
• Sequoia recruited him to open a Brazil office, then shelved the plan in October 2012.
• Nubank's December 2021 NYSE debut valued it at roughly 45 to 52 billion dollars on day one.
• By the fourth quarter of 2025, Nubank served 131 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
• The name "Nu" derives from the Portuguese word for "naked," signaling stripped-down simplicity.