Brazil’s Nubank Acquires US Software Firm Cognitect

Brazil’s unicorn startup Nubank has acquired US software firm Cognitect, gaining wider access to American engineers specialized in writing codes for fintech products and services.

Durham, NC-based Cognitect is behind the Clojure programming language and Datomic database.

This is Nubank’s first acquisition outside of Brazil but the second M&A transaction of the year, having purchased a regional software consultancy Plataformatec earlier in January.

Cognitect has been a technology partner of Nubank since 2014. Therefore, today most of Nubank’s engineers are familiar with Clojure programming language.

“Nubank has grown to 600 Clojure developers, running 2.5 million lines of Clojure code in 500 microservices on over 2000 Datomic servers. Cognitect has been there every step of the way,” writes Cognitect’s founders in a company’s blog post.

“We have always used technology to solve problems, but with Nubank we are looking forward to an even more direct connection between the systems we build and their impact on millions of people,” said Justin Gehtland, CEO of Cognitect, in a press release.

Nubank is no longer a startup, it has now grown into a giant financial services provider, having capitalized on the large mass of unbanked population across Latin America. With 25 million active customers, the one-time startup is now valued at more than US$10 billion.

Central to its success are its offerings of digital accounts and credit cards without an annual fee. “Nubank, at its core, is a tech company and we are true believers that technology can have a positive impact on people’s lives,” stated David Vélez, CEO of Nubank.

Cognitect will continue to operate independently even after the closing of the deal, with its founders joining Nubank as partners. In addition, the Clojure programming language will remain open-source.

“As a customer-centric technology company, we view our custom software development capabilities as core to our long term success,” says Edward Wible, co-founder and CTO of Nubank.

“We aim to have the most talented technical team in the market in order to reinvent and develop the best financial services and products for our customers.”