Ex-Nubank team raises $85m for Decade, an AI wealth adviser promising “a generation of millionaires”

Two former Nubank executives have raised $85m to build an AI wealth adviser in Brazil. Their backers call it the largest seed round in Latin American history. The startup, Decade, came out of stealth on Tuesday with money from Greenoaks, Benchmark and Diffusion, and a striking promise: to create “a new generation of millionaires.”

The founders carry weight. Vitor Olivier was an early engineer at Nubank and rose to chief technology officer as it grew into the world’s largest digital bank, with more than 100 million customers. Felipe Meneses, the first Brazilian named a Thiel Fellow, founded the AI startup Hyperplane, which Nubank later bought. Bloomberg first reported the launch.

The round, worth about R$440m, is unusually large for a company still on a waitlist with nothing shipped. The investor list explains the nerve. Greenoaks has backed Stripe, Revolut and Anthropic. Benchmark seeded Uber and Snap. Diffusion was founded by Victor Lazarte, who built Wildlife Studios into Latin America’s largest gaming company.

The pitch, and the gap it names

Decade’s case starts with a real problem. Only about a third of Brazilians hold any investment, and just 7% can live off their savings in retirement. That is despite the country leading the world in payments. Pix, Brazil’s instant-payment system, handles close to 100 billion transactions a year.

The company frames money management as a “second job” most people do badly, steered by advisers whose pay depends on selling them products. “Financial services are complex by design and often monetised through asymmetry of information,” said Meneses. “AI collapses that asymmetry.”

So Decade pairs each client with a senior human adviser and a proprietary AI model that holds their full financial picture and remembers every conversation. The two watch spending and portfolios around the clock, the company says, pulled together through Open Finance. It is a bet that a human plus AI beats either on its own.

A very big claim

The 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 put it more plainly. Nubank cut banking fees for tens of millions, he said, and “investing never got its turn. Now it will.”

It is a lot to promise from a standing start. 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 also has to prove it beats a cheaper robo-adviser. AI wealth tools are multiplying fast, and “a generation of millionaires” is a marketing line, not a forecast.

The deal also fits a pattern. Greenoaks and Benchmark wrote a similar outsized cheque months ago for Pax, an AI public-safety startup, in another record Latin American seed. Big US funds are treating Brazil as fertile ground for AI companies with sweeping social pitches. Whether Decade can turn $85m and a manifesto into millions of richer Brazilians is the part that waits on a product.