We Speak Entrepreneurs

Cristina Junqueira Co-Founded a Bank for 127 Million People in Brazil. Now She Moved to Miami to Build Its American One

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

Cristina Junqueira, co-founder of Nu and CEO of its U.S. business, speaking at an event. Photo by Lucasgilbatista, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Most founders who build a company serving 127 million customers get to slow down. Cristina Junqueira relocated to another country and started the hardest part over. The Brazilian co-founder of Nu is now personally leading its push into the United States, and in January 2026 regulators handed her project the fastest conditional yes of its kind in years.

Junqueira co-founded Nu in São Paulo in 2013 with David Vélez and Edward Wible, building a digital bank that now serves more than 127 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. On September 30, 2025, Nu applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to form a new national bank, Nubank, N.A. On January 29, 2026, just 121 days later, the OCC granted conditional approval, putting the company into the bank organization phase: it must fully capitalize the bank within 12 months and open it within 18, with final sign offs still needed from the Federal Reserve and the FDIC. Junqueira, who moved to Miami for the job, will serve as chief executive of the U.S. bank and expects it to begin operating in 2027.

She has been plain about the pace she intends to keep. Speaking in London in October 2025, she said: “Regulatory filings do take their time, and it’s a process that we take very seriously.” Once chartered, the U.S. bank will offer deposit accounts, credit cards, lending and digital asset custody under a federal framework, the same playbook Nu used to upend banking in Latin America.

In February 2026, Nu announced Junqueira’s place on the CNBC Changemakers list of women transforming business in 2026. The recognition fits the assignment she has taken: not defending what she built, but building it again, in the most regulated market on earth, with her own name on the application.

We Speak Entrepreneurs

Lucy Guo Left Scale AI in 2018 and Kept Her Shares. At 30 She Became the Youngest Self Made Woman Billionaire While Building Passes

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

We Speak Media

Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI and founder and CEO of Passes. Photo by KBDBK, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The most valuable decision of Lucy Guo’s career was the one she made on her way out the door. When she left Scale AI in 2018, two years after co-founding it, she kept her stake. In April 2025 Forbes named her the youngest self made woman billionaire in the world, and she earned the title while running a completely different company.

Guo, a self taught coder who dropped out of Carnegie Mellon on a Thiel Fellowship, co-founded Scale AI in 2016 at 21 with Alexandr Wang, who was 19. She ran operations and product design before leaving in 2018, holding on to just under 5% of the company. As Scale’s value climbed, a 2025 tender offer at a $25 billion valuation, followed by Meta’s June 2025 investment at more than $29 billion, that stake carried her net worth to an estimated $1.25 billion at age 30, passing the mark Taylor Swift had set. Forbes counted her among just six self made women billionaires on the planet under 40.

Her working days, though, belong to her second company. Guo founded Passes in 2022, a Los Angeles based platform that lets creators sell subscriptions, chats and content directly to fans in a brand safe setting. Passes has raised about $50 million across three rounds from investors including Bond Capital and Menlo Ventures, at a reported $150 million valuation, and has signed names including gymnast Olivia Dunne and Shaquille O’Neal.

The pairing is the story business students will study. One founder, two companies: the first made her rich because she kept ownership even after she left the building, and the second is the one she is still in the building for, building the creator economy platform she wants to run for the long term.