Brazil’s Nubank to raise more than US$2 billion on Nasdaq stock market

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – São Paulo-based Nubank, whose shareholders include billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, is planning its more than US$2 billion initial public offering on Nasdaq in the last quarter of this year, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company is expected to be valued at more than US$40 billion, said the people who asked not to be named because the transaction is not yet public.

Talks are ongoing, and details are subject to change. Banks leading the IPO include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and UBS, the sources said. Nubank, UBS, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

By comparison, Itaú, Latin America’s largest bank, has a market value of about US$55 billion. In June, Berkshire bought a US$500 million stake in Nubank, the world’s largest independent digital bank, valuing the fintech company at US$30 billion, people said at the time.

In the 2019 round, the fintech company was valued at US$10.4 billion. Today, Nubank has more than 40 million customers.

The fintech company, where Advent International and Tencent have stakes, is a rare tech unicorn with a woman among its founders: Cristina Junqueira. She co-founded Nubank in 2013 with David Vélez, a private equity veteran, and Edward Wible, which started with a no-fee, no-bureaucracy credit card and now offers other online banking services.

According to the company, the latest round of investment the company received, which includes funds from Berkshire and Sands Capital, totaled US$1.15 billion. The funds will help the fintech company expand into other Latin American countries, including Mexico and Colombia.

In Brazil, Nubank recently acquired Easynvest, a brokerage firm with 1.6 million customers and about US$5 billion in custody assets, and is in the process of entering the third-party wealth management market.

David Vélez recently announced that he has signed up to the Giving Pledge program launched by Warren Buffett in 2010. Besides Brazilian tycoon Elie Horn, he is the only Latin American to have done so.