Hello and welcome back to equity a podcast about the business of

startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. I'm

Mary Ann Azavado and this is our interview show where we sit down with a

guest think about their work and unpack the rest.

Today we're once again talking to Devide Vales, the co-founder and CEO of New Bank, a

South Paulo based digital bank that offers credit cards checking accounts and life insurance to

consumers it's a company that just crossed a market cap of 50 billion dollars.

Devid welcome to the show.

Good Marianne thank you so much for having me.

Yes thank you for being here. Today we'll be talking about a variety of topics. We'll get into what's been going on with New Bank over the last 12 months. We'll do a Lat-AM-in, including discussing whether or not global

VCs have been abandoning the region or not. We'll discuss which Latam

startups have been the most resilient in this downturn and more.

Why don't we dive in?

Let's do it.

Great, so as I mentioned in the introduction, New Bank just crossed a market cap of $50 billion.

Now last year when we talked, the was valued at if I recall correctly about

35 billion dollars so what happened over the past year I mean I know very

recently you just announced that you ended 2023 with a net profit of $1 billion.

So was that the first time that you recorded a profit?

We started recording a profit towards the end of 22. We were

already in the last couple of cars 22. We were profitable, but we were able to

really show significant profitability and increasing throughout 2023.

...