Two former Nubank executives have raised $85m to build an AI wealth adviser in Brazil, a seed round their backers describe as the largest in Latin American history. The funding comes from Greenoaks, Benchmark and Diffusion, and the startup, Decade, emerged from stealth this week with the stated aim of creating “a new generation of millionaires.”
Vitor Olivier and Felipe Meneses carry significant credentials. Olivier was an early engineer at Nubank and rose to chief technology officer as the bank grew to more than 100 million customers. Meneses, the first Brazilian named a Thiel Fellow, founded the AI startup Hyperplane, which Nubank later acquired.
The round, reported at about R$440m, is unusually large for a company that is still on a waitlist and has shipped no product. Investors point to their track records: Greenoaks has backed Stripe, Revolut and Anthropic; Benchmark seeded Uber and Snap; and Diffusion was founded by Victor Lazarte, who built Wildlife Studios into Latin America’s largest gaming company.
Decade’s pitch and the gap it targets
Decade frames its service around persistent gaps in Brazilian saving and investing. Only about a third of Brazilians hold any investment, and just 7% can live off their savings in retirement, the company notes. That shortfall exists despite Brazil’s leading payments infrastructure: Pix, the country’s instant-payment system, handles close to 100 billion transactions a year.
Meneses describes financial advice as a poorly executed “second job” for most people, often driven by advisers whose pay depends on selling products. “Financial services are complex by design and often monetised through asymmetry of information,” he said. “AI collapses that asymmetry.”
Decade plans to pair each client with a senior human adviser and a proprietary AI model that holds their full financial picture and remembers every conversation. The company says the two monitor spending and portfolios around the clock, assembled via Open Finance. The proposition is that a human-plus-AI approach will outperform either humans or robo-advisers alone.
Big claim, no product yet
The company’s ambition is deliberately grand. “That level of attention used to be reserved for the ultra-rich,” Meneses said. “Now we can create an entire generation of millionaires.” Neil Mehta of Greenoaks added that while Nubank cut banking fees for tens of millions, “investing never got its turn. Now it will.”
Skepticism is implicit in the facts: Decade has raised more than any Latin American seed before it, yet it has no launched product and no track record. Its human-plus-AI model must still prove it can outperform cheaper robo-advisers at scale. AI wealth tools are multiplying rapidly, and the promise to create “a generation of millionaires” remains a marketing claim rather than a forecast.
The deal also fits a broader pattern of large US funds writing outsized checks in Brazil; Greenoaks and Benchmark made a similar large seed investment months earlier in Pax, an AI public-safety startup. Whether Decade can turn $85m and a manifesto into millions of richer Brazilians will depend on the product it ultimately delivers.
