Mercury vs Nubank

Introducing Mercury Books

Mercury has launched a new product called Mercury Books, a bookkeeping solution, and also introduced exclusive mutual fund products through Mercury Treasury.

Grok Bot Built in a Month by Small Team

Roman Ugarte, who led Growth at Cursor, details how he and a small team built Grok Bot for SpaceXAI from scratch in four weeks, then launched it publicly three weeks later. The article covers key decisions, such as building independently rather than integrating with Cursor, and the team's manual onboarding of nearly 300 initial users. Early product choices and a 'colleague-pilled' philosophy contributed to the bot's success. Roman also discusses moats and Cursor's competitive strategy.

• Grok Bot was built from scratch in four weeks by a small team at SpaceXAI.
• Roman Ugarte previously led Growth at Cursor, scaling it from 15 to over 1,000 employees before acquisition by SpaceX.
• The team manually onboarded nearly 300 of the first users.

Revolut Launches PRAGMA; Fintechs Converge on AI

Revolut launched Revolut Research to develop PRAGMA, a proprietary encoder-style foundation-model family (≈10 million–1 billion parameters) pre-trained on multi-source behavioral data from roughly 80 million customers across 100+ countries — tens of millions of user records and tens of billions of events. Revolut reports material production uplifts: ~2.3× better credit-default detection and 65% more fraud cases caught. The announcement is presented as part of an industry-wide convergence (Nubank, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Plaid and NVIDIA have comparable efforts; NVIDIA published a blueprint and completed a reported $7B “Poolside” deal). The newsletter highlights engineering, latency, compute-economics, proprietary-data moats, and regulatory constraints (notably the EU AI Act and explainability) that limit deployment in high-risk credit use cases today.

• Revolut launched Revolut Research to build PRAGMA, a proprietary encoder-style foundation-model family.
• PRAGMA was pre-trained on multi-source behavioral data from roughly 80 million customers across 100+ countries — tens of millions of user records and tens of billions of events.
• PRAGMA family spans approximately 10 million to 1 billion parameters.

Nubank Q2 2026: $1B Quarter Inflated by Tax Break

Nubank reported Q2 2026 net income of $1.06B (first-ever >$1B), revenue of $5.9B (+39%), and a record 33% return on equity, driven by high operating leverage and AI-driven risk improvements. The author highlights that Nubank's effective tax rate fell to 14.17% from 27.56% a year earlier — reapplying last year’s tax rate would reduce Q2 net income to $896M — and notes an undisclosed $500M buyback. The newsletter also references Nubank’s in-house AI model “NuFormer” (claimed ~70% reduction in predicted risk) and Razorpay’s new Vulcan foundation model for payments (trained on ~4 billion payments), framing the quarter as both a fintech financial milestone and an example of AI-enabled operating leverage.

• Nubank reported Q2 2026 net income of $1.06B (+49% FX-neutral).
• Nubank Q2 2026 revenue was $5.9B, up 39% year-over-year.
• Nubank reported a record return on equity (ROE) of 33% and an efficiency ratio of 19.5%.

OpenAI Adds Two Financial Executives to Boards

OpenAI appointed financial executives David Vélez and Robin Vince to its nonprofit and for‑profit boards as the company prepares for a potential IPO. Vélez, CEO of Nubank, and Vince, described as CEO of the financial services company BNY, will join existing board members including Bret Taylor and Sam Altman. The moves follow OpenAI's October recapitalization that created the OpenAI Foundation (the nonprofit) with a controlling stake in the OpenAI Group PBC (the for‑profit). OpenAI is valued at more than $850 billion and confidentially filed its IPO prospectus in June; the nonprofit's equity was previously valued at about $130 billion.

• OpenAI appointed David Vélez and Robin Vince to its nonprofit and for‑profit boards of directors.
• David Vélez is described as CEO of Nubank, the largest digital bank in Latin America.
• Robin Vince is described as CEO of the financial services company BNY.