Nubank

GitPod

Nubank

Nubank makes money from credit card interchange fees (1-3% of every transaction), interest on credit card balances and personal loans, and net interest income from deposits (lending out customer deposits at higher rates than it pays in savings interest). The company also earns fees from insurance products and investment marketplace commissions.

The key insight is that by being digital-only with no branches, Nubank's cost to serve a customer is roughly 85% lower than traditional Brazilian banks.

GitPod

GitPod started as freemium: a free tier of monthly cloud hours, paid plans for more hours and bigger workspaces, and enterprise contracts with self-hosted and dedicated options. As Ona it shifted toward enterprise contracts for running AI coding agents inside a customer's own cloud, with governance and security controls.

It said enterprise annual recurring revenue quadrupled year over year before the rename. OpenAI acquired the company in 2026, and existing customer commitments continue to be supported.

Nubank

David Vélez grew up in Colombia, studied at Stanford Business School, and worked at Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley. In 2012, Sequoia sent him to Brazil to find investment opportunities.

What he found instead was the worst banking experience he'd ever encountered.

Brazilian banks were controlled by five massive institutions that charged outrageous fees — annual credit card fees of $200+, account maintenance fees, fees on fees. Customer service was a nightmare.

Branches required hours of waiting. The banks had zero incentive to improve because they had a captive market of 200 million people and no competition.

Vélez saw the opportunity and left Sequoia to start Nubank in 2013 with Cristina Junqueira (a former Itaú banker) and Edward Wible (a Princeton engineer). Their first product was a purple credit card — no annual fee, managed entirely through a beautiful app, with transparent billing and real-time notifications.

In a country where banks treated customers like an inconvenience, Nubank treated them like human beings.

GitPod

The GitPod team came out of TypeFox, a German developer tools company in Kiel behind the Theia cloud IDE framework. Sven Efftinge and his colleagues realized the biggest pain point was not the editor itself but the environment.

Developers spent hours configuring machines, installing dependencies and debugging "it works on my machine" problems.

They launched GitPod to provide instant, automated cloud development environments. One click from a GitHub or GitLab repo opened a fully configured workspace with dependencies installed and tools ready.

Johannes Landgraf, who became CEO, and CTO Christian Weichel later led the company through its rename to Ona in 2025 and its sale to OpenAI in 2026.

Nubank

Nubank grew through word of mouth in a country where everyone hated their bank. The product was so much better than the alternative that customers became evangelists.

The invite-only launch created exclusivity and a waitlist that hit millions. People would beg friends for an invite code because getting a Nubank card felt like escaping prison.

The cost advantage was structural. Traditional Brazilian banks operated thousands of branches with tens of thousands of employees.

Nubank had an app and a customer service team. This let Nubank offer free products that banks charged hundreds of dollars for.

The unit economics were unbeatable — when your competitor has 4,000 branches and you have zero, you can afford to be generous.

Geographic expansion into Mexico and Colombia replicated the playbook. Both countries had the same banking problem — concentrated, fee-heavy, customer-hostile banks.

Nubank launched in Mexico in 2019 and Colombia in 2020. Mexico alone already has over 8 million Nubank customers.

GitPod

GitPod grew through open source community adoption and one-click integrations with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, where a "Gitpod" button on a repo launched a ready workspace. It later moved upmarket to banks and pharmaceutical companies that wanted cloud development under tight security.

In 2025 it bet the company on AI agents, renaming itself Ona and claiming its own agents were producing most of its merged code. That bet ended in a sale to OpenAI in 2026.

Nubank

The IPO timing was terrible. Nubank went public on the NYSE in December 2021 at a $41 billion valuation.

The stock immediately crashed as the global tech sell-off hit and rising interest rates in Brazil increased the cost of capital. The stock fell from $12 to under $4 by mid-2022.

Vélez had to spend a year convincing investors that a Brazilian digital bank was worth owning during a global risk-off environment.

Credit risk in Latin America is inherently higher. Brazil has volatile inflation, currency risk, and a large unbanked population with limited credit history.

Nubank's loan book grew rapidly, and delinquency rates spiked in 2022 as Brazil's economy slowed. Managing credit risk at scale in emerging markets is fundamentally harder than in developed economies.

Nubank has since tightened underwriting and delinquency has improved, but it remains the biggest operational risk.

Regulatory complexity across three countries is a constant headache. Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia each have different banking regulations, consumer protection laws, and compliance requirements.

Navigating three regulatory environments simultaneously while growing at speed requires significant legal and compliance investment.

GitPod

GitHub Codespaces, backed by Microsoft and GitHub's enormous distribution, was a direct competitor, and AWS stopped taking new Cloud9 customers in 2024, a sign of how tough the cloud IDE market was. Convincing developers to give up their carefully configured laptops proved hard.

Then AI coding tools threatened to make the whole category a feature. GitPod's answer was to reinvent itself as Ona, an AI agent platform, and ultimately to sell to OpenAI in 2026 rather than compete alone.

Nubank

Nu Credit Card is the flagship — a no-annual-fee Mastercard managed entirely through the app. NuConta is the digital bank account with free transfers and bill payments.

Nu Invest is the investment platform offering stocks, ETFs, and fixed income. Personal Loans are offered based on credit behavior within the app.

Nu Life Insurance and other insurance products are distributed through the app. Ultraviolet is the premium tier with higher limits, airport lounges, and additional perks.

NuPay is the payments solution for merchants.

GitPod

Before 2025: cloud development environments, instant pre-configured workspaces defined in a .gitpod.yml file, with prebuilds and support for VS Code and JetBrains, plus a self-hosted enterprise option. As Ona (since September 2025): a platform for running software engineering AI agents in secure, sandboxed cloud environments, with VS Code in the browser and access from phone, tablet or laptop.

Since August 2026 the technology is part of OpenAI's Codex team.

Nubank

Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, DST Global, Tencent, Berkshire Hathaway, SoftBank, Dragoneer

GitPod

Speedinvest led the $3 million seed in October 2020, with Crane Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures US. General Catalyst led a $13 million round in April 2021.

GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner led the $25 million Series A in November 2022. Total funding was about $41 million.