They built three of Brazil’s most valuable financial platforms — a digital bank, a payments processor, and an investment brokerage — and spent years competing fiercely against one another for customers. Now the men behind Nubank, Stone, and XP Investimentos have decided the country’s next problem demands collaboration, not competition. This is part of The Rio Times’ daily coverage of Latin American news and financial markets.
David Vélez, André Street, and Guilherme Benchimol on Tuesday formally launched B55, a nonprofit institute designed to help small and mid-sized businesses break through the growth plateau that stalls the vast majority of Brazilian enterprises.
The name itself carries intent: “B” for base, “55” for Brazil’s international dialing code — a signal that the ambition is global even if the work starts local.
The diagnosis behind the venture is blunt. Brazil is the world’s second-ranked country in entrepreneurial potential, yet roughly 70% of its companies stagnate after surviving their early years, according to figures cited by B55 CEO Cristhiano Faé.
“They don’t grow, they drift sideways and, eventually, they shut down,” Faé told Bloomberg Línea. The country counts some 47 million entrepreneurs; the problem is not a shortage of ambition but of the applied knowledge, networks, and method needed to scale.
B55 will operate across four pillars — education and development, community and networking, acceleration programs with capital support, and a planned physical hub whose city is still being negotiated.
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The founders contributed an undisclosed sum described as being in the millions of dollars, and the goal is financial self-sufficiency within the first year despite the nonprofit structure. Operations begin from a São Paulo office with an initial team of around ten people.
What distinguishes B55 from Brazil’s existing accelerators and business education programs is its roster. More than 20 ambassadors have signed on to mentor and teach, headlined by 3G Capital co-founder Jorge Paulo Lemann — the country’s richest person and the force behind Anheuser-Busch InBev and Kraft Heinz.
Other confirmed names include Suzano chairman David Feffer, iFood and Prosus executive Fabricio Bloisi, VTEX co-founder Mariano Gomide, and Brex co-founders Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras. The initiative was also reportedly presented to Brazil’s 30 largest entrepreneurs, all of whom committed to contributing.
Crucially, B55 is not chasing the typical Silicon Valley startup playbook. Its target audience is the owner of a logistics company, a chain of medical clinics, or a regional restaurant group — businesses already generating revenue but stuck in a cycle of stagnation that no fintech app can fix.
“We don’t want to sell weekend courses or hand out certificates,” Benchimol said in a statement. “We want a space where people feel safe to talk about their vulnerabilities and have conversations that concretely impact their companies.”
Faé, who founded the supply-chain startup Accera before selling it to Neogrid in 2018 and was named an Endeavor Global Entrepreneur, will run day-to-day operations. The first product will be unveiled on March 5, with programming beginning in April.
By year’s end, B55 aims to offer a mix of paid and free programs spanning different business stages, from entrepreneurs who just survived the initial turbulence to those preparing for eventual public offerings.
The bet is straightforward: if the architects of Nubank, Stone, and XP can open their playbooks — and their contact lists — to the owner of a trucking firm in Minas Gerais or a software shop in Recife, the next wave of Brazilian business success stories might come not from fintech but from the unglamorous backbone of the real economy.
“The market is strong, but what’s missing is real connection, concrete exchange, and more shared experience,” Street said. Whether that connection can scale as efficiently as a banking app remains the open question.
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