Vitor Olivier Decade is a founder story that starts with a rare kind of career decision: walking away from being chief technology officer of the world’s largest digital bank to build something smaller, riskier, and entirely new. Olivier is the co-founder and CEO of Decade, a São Paulo and San Francisco-based startup pairing AI with human financial advisors to bring private wealth management to a far broader audience than the ultra-wealthy clients such advice has traditionally served. On August 4, 2026, Decade emerged from stealth with an $85 million seed round, described by multiple outlets as the largest seed round ever raised by a Latin American startup. Here is how a 12-year Nubank veteran and the youngest Brazilian ever selected for the Thiel Fellowship teamed up to try to build what they call a new generation of millionaires.
Who Is Vitor Olivier?
Vitor Olivier is the co-founder and CEO of Decade, according to citybiz’s coverage of the company’s seed round. He holds a degree from Duke University and joined Nubank in 2014, when the company had just five employees, no customers, and a reported $10 million valuation, making him one of the digital bank’s earliest hires.
That early-employee vantage point, joining a company years before it became a household name across Latin America, gave Olivier a rare, ground-level view of exactly how much operational and technical infrastructure it takes to scale financial services to hundreds of millions of people, experience that shows up directly in how deliberately Decade has been built.
Building Nubank’s Infrastructure for 100 Million Customers
Over nearly 12 years at Nubank, Olivier led the architecture of the NuConta account platform, served as the company’s general manager in Brazil, headed its people operations function, and eventually became global chief technology officer, overseeing engineering for a publicly traded institution serving more than 100 million customers across Latin America. That range, spanning core technical architecture, country-level general management, and people operations, gave Olivier a broader executive skill set than a pure engineering leadership track typically provides.
Olivier left Nubank in September 2025, saying he wanted to build again rather than manage, and to tackle problems that were never priorities inside a bank the size of Nubank. His conclusion after leaving: most Brazilians simply cannot manage their own money well, and AI could finally make high-end financial guidance affordable at scale.
Felipe Meneses: From Sergipe to a Thiel Fellowship to Selling to Nubank
Decade’s co-founder, Felipe Meneses, brings a very different but equally striking background. In March 2024, at just 24 years old, Meneses became the first Brazilian ever selected for the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program created by investor Peter Thiel with more than 270 alumni. Meneses had co-founded Hyperplane in 2022, a Palo Alto-based AI company that trained self-supervised deep learning models for financial institutions.
Hyperplane raised $6 million in seed funding from investors including Lachy Groom, SV Angel, and Clocktower Technology Ventures, before beginning a pilot with Nubank: in three months, Meneses’s team trained 11 models that outperformed the ones Nubank was already using. That result led directly to Nubank acquiring Hyperplane in June 2024, when Meneses was 24. He spent roughly a year afterward working as a machine learning engineer inside Olivier’s technology organization at Nubank, which is where the two began discussing what would eventually become Decade.
The Problem Decade Set Out to Solve
Meneses has framed the core problem Decade addresses directly. “Financial services are complex by design and often monetised through asymmetry of information,” he said. That asymmetry means the kind of coordinated, personalized financial guidance available to ultra-wealthy clients through multi-family offices, spanning tax strategy, investment allocation, spending analysis, and risk management, has remained financially and practically out of reach for the vast majority of people.
Neil Mehta, founder of Greenoaks, framed the opportunity in terms of unfinished business in Brazilian financial services. “A decade ago, Brazilians paid some of the highest banking fees in the world,” he said, noting that Brazil’s Pix instant payments network and open finance rules have reshaped retail banking and payments, but investing and wealth management have not yet seen a comparable transformation.
Building Decade: AI-Native Wealth Advisory for Everyone
Decade pairs every client with a senior human financial advisor, supported by proprietary AI software that analyzes financial statements, investment holdings, spending behavior, and market information to give each advisor a complete picture of a client’s finances. The platform uses Brazil’s Open Finance system to consolidate a user’s banking and investment data automatically, then applies AI to run simulations, financial projections, and answer client questions directly.
The company charges a monthly subscription of roughly R$200 (about $39) for its core AI wealth service, alongside a separate, invite-only, fee-based offering aimed at wealthier clients who want deeper advisory support. As of its funding announcement, Decade remains accessible only through a waitlist, with its consumer product not yet broadly shipped, an unusually early stage for a company that just closed one of the largest seed rounds in its region’s history.
Inside Decade’s $85 Million Seed Round
Vitor Olivier Decade raised $85 million, roughly R$440 million, in a seed round that closed in September 2025 and was publicly announced on August 4, 2026, led by Greenoaks and Benchmark, with participation from Diffusion, Atlantico, and Norte Ventures. Distrito, a Brazilian startup data firm, has described the round as the largest seed financing on record in Brazil and Latin America, surpassing the $40 million raised by security startup Pax earlier in 2026.
The company, then still operating under an earlier name, Frontier Technologies, closed the round quietly before rebranding to Decade ahead of its public announcement, giving the founders roughly a year to build before facing public market feedback.
The Investors Backing Vitor Olivier
Greenoaks, led by founder Neil Mehta, has previously backed Stripe, Revolut, and Anthropic, while Benchmark’s portfolio includes early investments in Uber and Snap. Diffusion, the third major fund in the round, was founded by Victor Lazarte, who built Wildlife Studios into Latin America’s largest gaming company, alongside Kris Fredrickson.
That combination of globally recognized venture firms, none of which specialize primarily in Latin American startups, choosing to lead a Brazilian company’s seed round signals investor conviction that reaches well beyond typical regional venture capital circles, a pattern more commonly seen at growth-stage rounds than at seed.
Decade’s Position in the AI Wealth Management Race
Decade differentiates itself from conventional digital brokerages and robo-advisors by pairing every client with a dedicated human advisor rather than replacing human guidance with a purely automated interface. That hybrid model echoes a broader pattern emerging across AI-native financial services, where the most credible new entrants tend to position AI as augmenting rather than replacing trusted human relationships, particularly in a category as personal as individual wealth management.
Decade’s specific advantage in the Brazilian market is its founders’ direct, insider experience with the exact banking and open finance infrastructure the product depends on, built over Olivier’s nearly 12 years helping construct that ecosystem from inside one of its largest institutions.
What’s Next for Decade
With fresh seed capital, Decade’s near-term priorities center on converting its waitlist into paying customers, expanding its AI platform’s capabilities, and broadening access to wealth advisory services across Brazil. The company’s stated ambition, to “create a new generation of millionaires,” suggests a long-term goal extending well beyond its initial Brazilian market into a broader thesis about democratizing sophisticated financial guidance.
Given the scale of capital already raised before any broad product launch, Decade’s near-term challenge will likely be proving that its AI-plus-human-advisor model can scale efficiently enough to serve a mass-market subscription base while maintaining the kind of personalized guidance its higher-end invite-only tier promises to wealthier clients.
Lessons for Entrepreneurs From Vitor Olivier’s Journey
Olivier’s path offers a few clear lessons for senior executives considering leaving an established company to found something new. First, his decision to leave Nubank specifically to build again rather than manage reflects a common but rarely acted-upon instinct among senior operators, that operational scale and creative building satisfy fundamentally different professional needs. Second, partnering with Meneses, whose path ran through founding and selling his own AI company rather than through traditional banking experience, gave Decade genuine technical AI depth that Olivier’s own background, while broad, did not directly provide.
Third, the two founders’ relationship forming organically inside Nubank after Hyperplane’s acquisition, rather than through a formal co-founder matching process, suggests that some of the strongest founding partnerships emerge from real working relationships rather than being assembled specifically to start a company.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Vitor Olivier? Vitor Olivier is the co-founder and CEO of Decade, an AI-native wealth advisory startup. He spent nearly 12 years at Nubank, joining as one of its earliest employees in 2014 and rising to global chief technology officer before leaving in September 2025.
What does Decade do? Decade pairs clients with human financial advisors supported by proprietary AI software that analyzes financial data, spending behavior, and market information, using Brazil’s Open Finance system to consolidate banking and investment data automatically.
How much funding has Decade raised? Decade raised $85 million (roughly R$440 million) in a seed round that closed in September 2025 and was announced August 4, 2026, led by Greenoaks and Benchmark, with participation from Diffusion, Atlantico, and Norte Ventures. It is described as the largest seed round ever raised by a Latin American startup.
Who co-founded Decade with Vitor Olivier? Decade was co-founded by Vitor Olivier and Felipe Meneses. Meneses is the first Brazilian ever selected for the Thiel Fellowship and previously co-founded Hyperplane, an AI company for financial institutions that Nubank acquired in 2024.
How much does Decade cost? Decade charges a monthly subscription of roughly R$200 (about $39) for its core AI wealth service, alongside a separate, invite-only, fee-based product for wealthier clients.
Where is Decade based? Decade is based in São Paulo, Brazil, and San Francisco, California.
Conclusion
Vitor Olivier Decade represents a bet that the exact infrastructure and trust problems that made Brazilian banking so expensive and inaccessible for decades can now be solved for wealth management the same way Nubank once solved them for everyday banking. With $85 million in seed funding, backing from investors who have previously bet on Stripe, Uber, and Anthropic, and a founding team combining large-scale banking infrastructure experience with genuine applied AI credibility, Decade is testing whether sophisticated financial guidance can finally reach far beyond the ultra-wealthy clients it has traditionally served.
For more founder stories in AI-native financial infrastructure, see Rron Rexha’s Arca, Ryan Williams’s Ellis AI, and Baran Ataş’s Talp on Denote Press.
