See the story of 25 and 26-year-old Brazilian billionaires

Brazilians Pedro Franceschi, 25, and Henrique Dubugras, 26, are the youngest billionaires in the Forbes ranking, released this Tuesday (5th). The entrepreneurs, according to the magazine, have a fortune of US$ 1.5 billion each (almost R$ 7 billion).

They are co-founders of corporate credit card startup Brex, which, according to the magazine, was valued at $12.3 billion by investors in January.

In 2014, the sheet talked to the duo, when the business they had at the time — the startup Pagar.me, later sold to Stone — had just received a contribution of R$ 1 million. See the report below.



Pedro Franceschi, from Rio de Janeiro, and Henrique Dubugras, 18, from São Paulo, have a few years of experience in adapting devices and software for their own consumption: unlocking iPhones and iPods, which led to a notification from Apple to Franceschi, and “scams” to not pay for virtual games.

Instead of using their knowledge just for the love of hacking, the two decided to create a business – they weren’t old enough to start a company and answer for it, so they had to emancipate themselves to do that last year.

And they managed to raise at least R$ 1 million, according to Dubugras, with investors from Arpex Capital and Grid Investments.

The two are founders of Pagar.me, a virtual payments company that promises to increase sales conversion from online stores.

The company now has ten employees and the boys say they are “very close” to breaking even. It is possible that 2014 will end in blue.

In the world of startups (tech startup companies), it is common to say that the quality of the team is more important than the idea itself.

So it makes sense that investors accept to bet on the idea of ​​such a young duo.

Franceschi became known on the internet at the age of 15 for being able to “teach” Siri (the voice recognition system used in Apple cell phones) to understand Portuguese.

“My mother saw it in the media and realized it was no joke,” says the young man of her concerns about excessive computer use.

It’s not their first job either. Dubugras was a minor apprentice at the ticketing startup Ingresse – he was hired there under that regime because that’s what the legislation allows for someone 14 years old, but his job was really programming.

His boss at the time, Gabriel Benarrós, 25, says he was always very “obsessed” and “ambitious” but “responsible”. “The problem is when the person is talented, a hacker, but has no commitment and doesn’t follow the rules.”

Dubugras and Franceschi met in 2012 via Twitter and at the end of the year they were invited to participate in a “hackathon” (programming marathon) in Miami, USA. Their group created a system called AskMeOut, which they call the “grandfather” of the dating app Tinder.

The project was the winner of the competition and they pocketed US$ 50 thousand, but it ended up not going forward because soon after, Bang With Friends appeared, a system whose function was to enable sex between people who are friends on Facebook, which was very similar to the AskMeOut.

“At the time we thought they had copied the idea, but it must have been a coincidence. Today, we don’t even care”, says the paulista.

It was from this project that the idea for Pagar.me came about: they intended to charge men who used the service, but they had great difficulty in implementing the charging system.

They ended up having the business idea and decided to stop enrolling at Stanford University, where they had been approved last year, to run the project, which Dubugras hopes will give rise to a “Brazil-based technology multinational.”