Compare / Nubank vs Pinterest
NUBANK
A Colombian-born Stanford MBA walked into a Brazilian bank, waited two hours in line, got treated like garbage…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Nubank
BUSINESS MODEL
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.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
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.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
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.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
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.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
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.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Nubank
Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, DST Global, Tencent, Berkshire Hathaway, SoftBank, Dragoneer
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.