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Western Hemisphere

Decade Raises $85M in Latin America's Largest Seed Round to Bring AI Wealth Management to Brazil

The Editor

The Editor

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Decade CEO Vitor Olivier and Co Founder Felipe Meneses
Decade CEO Vitor Olivier and Co Founder Felipe Meneses

Decade, a wealth management platform combining artificial intelligence with human financial advisors, emerged from stealth on August 4 announcing an US$85 million seed round, roughly R$440 million, described as the largest ever raised by a Latin American startup. Greenoaks, Benchmark, and Diffusion led the round, with participation from Brazilian funds Atlantico and Norte Ventures. The capital was actually committed in September 2025; the company spent the intervening months building and testing before going public. Decade operates from São Paulo and San Francisco with 26 employees, split between engineers and financial advisors.

The company was co-founded by CEO Vitor Olivier, who spent 12 years at Nubank rising from early engineer to chief technology officer before departing in August 2025, and Felipe Meneses, the first Brazilian selected for the Thiel Fellowship, who founded the AI credit platform Hyperplane and joined Nubank when it acquired the company in 2024. Decade charges R$200 a month for a subscription that consolidates a client's accounts through Brazil's Open Finance system, connecting to institutions including BTG Pactual, XP Investimentos, Genial, and C6, then monitors portfolios and spending continuously while pairing each client with a senior human advisor reachable via WhatsApp. The product has been in beta with selected users for six months and opened a waitlist at launch. The company holds a CVM investment consulting license and has applied for asset management authorization. "Managing your own money is a second job," Olivier said. "Perform poorly and you'll be indebted, structurally unable to retire."

Market Context

The pitch rests on a participation gap. Roughly 33% of Brazilians hold any financial investments, and only about 7% could fund their retirement from savings, figures the founders attribute to low financial literacy and to an advisory industry built on commissions that create conflicts between what advisors recommend and what clients need. Decade positions itself as an independent layer between customers and financial institutions, offering the kind of multi-family-office service normally reserved for large portfolios, without selling products for commission.

Brazil was chosen deliberately as a starting market. Pix processes close to 100 billion transactions a year and Open Finance provides standardized access to customer financial data across institutions, infrastructure that makes continuous portfolio monitoring technically feasible in ways it is not in most markets. The strategy echoes Nubank's own, using Brazil as a proving ground before expanding internationally. Meneses framed the timing in technical terms: "Há um ano, seria impossível construir o que estamos construindo." Greenoaks partner Neil Mehta put the investment thesis more bluntly, saying Nubank cut banking fees for tens of millions of people and that investing never got its turn.

The Signal

"Financial services are complex by design and often monetized through asymmetry of information. AI collapses that asymmetry." — Felipe Meneses, co-founder and Head of AI, Decade

Regional Relevance

For the United States: The round was led from Silicon Valley, with Greenoaks and Benchmark writing a record check into a Brazilian company that has yet to launch publicly, and Decade maintains a San Francisco office alongside its São Paulo base. The deal illustrates a pattern in which US megafunds increasingly treat Brazil as a testing ground for AI applications in financial services, drawn by regulatory infrastructure, Pix and Open Finance, that has no direct American equivalent. For US wealth management incumbents, the model being funded here, subscription pricing paired with AI monitoring instead of percentage-of-assets fees, is the same structural challenge arriving in a different market first.

For Brazil: The round is a milestone for the country's startup ecosystem, both for its size and for what it signals about the Nubank alumni network, now producing founders who can raise record sums on reputation before shipping a product. It also lands in a wealth management market dominated by XP Investimentos, BTG Pactual, and the private banking arms of large lenders, where commission-based distribution has long been the norm. If Decade's independent, fee-only model gains traction, the competitive pressure falls on exactly those incumbents, whose customer data Decade currently depends on through Open Finance.

The Other Side

Does the pricing match the democratization pitch? At R$200 a month, or R$2,400 a year, the subscription costs the equivalent of a 1% annual advisory fee on a portfolio of about R$240,000, and 2.4% on R$100,000. Below roughly a quarter of a million reais in assets, the flat fee is more expensive than the percentage-based advice it aims to displace, which places the product well out of reach of the two-thirds of Brazilians who hold no investments at all.

Can a company raise a record round before proving the model works? The US$85 million was committed in September 2025, and the product has been in limited beta for six months with a waitlist rather than open availability; the company must still demonstrate that pairing human advisors with AI outperforms cheaper automated alternatives, and it has not disclosed assets under management, client counts, or performance data.

Is "a new generation of millionaires" a forecast or a slogan? The framing has drawn skepticism as marketing rather than projection, and the gap between it and the actual product is wide: better portfolio monitoring and fee optimization improve returns at the margin, but wealth creation at the scale the name implies depends on savings rates, income growth, and market performance, none of which an advisory subscription controls. Decade is also still awaiting CVM authorization to manage portfolios directly.

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