Ariel Sbdar wanted to build his presentation while speaking in front of twelve thousand students at the Movistar Arena. He was going to use artificial intelligence to show how much someone could do with a computer. He was also wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses: he planned to record the talk through them.
But the plan went no further. On April 28, 2026, at Experiencia Endeavor Sub20, he was greeted with whistles and chants of “the homeland is not for sale.” The rejection was directed at what he had written on social media about the $LIBRA token. He tried to continue, joked that they were his fans and asked why they were calling him a traitor to his country. In the end, he left the stage.
The following day, on the radio, he said he was frustrated about discussing politics at an event for teenagers who had not yet decided what to do with their lives. He argued that Argentina needs more companies to be created.
His own is Cocos, the investment platform he founded with Nicolás Mindlin. It ended 2025 with two million users and more than US$2 billion in assets under management. On social media, Sbdar alternates company updates with market opinions and arguments with other investors.
Photos of Fifteenth Birthday Parties
As a child, he walked dogs to earn his own money. Later, while finishing school in Corrientes, he created racata.com. He took photographs at nightclubs, restaurants and birthday parties and published them the following morning. Some nights ended in front of the computer, uploading images at six.
Besides selling advertising, he charged for photographs of girls celebrating their fifteenth birthdays who wanted to appear on the site: one peso per image, around twenty-five US cents at the time. He was seventeen when he sold the website to one of the young people working with him.
In 2010, he moved to Buenos Aires to study Business Economics at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He knew few people and moved into the maid’s room of a cousin’s apartment.
While studying, he participated in the university’s finance club and worked at Restorando. He looked up to Warren Buffett, although he admits he still did not understand very well what Buffett did.
In 2013, he went to Tel Aviv and, according to his account, offered to work without pay at a technology company. He later obtained a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in Management at HEC Paris, where he specialized in mergers and acquisitions.
He returned to Argentina in 2015 and worked at Allaria Ledesma, Banco Macro and Banco Industrial, BIND. At the latter, he was head of strategy. He says he learned much of what he later applied at Cocos there. He also remembers going to the gym wearing a cap bearing the bank’s name: he was already promoting the company where he worked, even though it was not yet his own.
US$50,000 to Get Started
In 2020, they found a brokerage firm that was about to lose its license. Sbdar and Mindlin bought it for US$50,000 with their own money. He left his position at BIND, and in February 2021 they carried out their first transaction.
The market was coming off Argentina’s 2019 primary elections and going through the pandemic. Sbdar remembers that several colleagues preferred to take advantage of financial arbitrage opportunities rather than start a company. They decided to move forward.
Mindlin, Marcelo Mindlin’s son, became chairman. Sbdar describes him as the greater risk-taker of the two and often mentions him when asked how he handles the pressure of running the business.
In 2021, Cocos generated revenue of around US$1.5 million. In 2025, it reached US$49.7 million, up 75% from the previous year. The company reported adjusted EBITDA of US$25 million and equity exceeding US$45 million.
Cocos Asset Management manages more than US$1.2 billion. The company serves around 2,300 businesses and has close to two hundred employees. It also reported participating in more than thirty corporate issuances totaling US$150 million.
When challenged about the accounts, Sbdar usually tells people to read the financial statements filed with the CNV. He prefers that response to explaining the numbers in a social media argument.
A Bank and an Acquisition in Brazil
In August 2025, Cocos announced the acquisition of Banco Voii for US$20 million. The Central Bank approved the transaction on June 5, 2026.
The bank had two branches, 788 savings accounts, 76 checking accounts and no salary accounts. The license allowed Cocos to add services: savings accounts, US dollar purchases at the official exchange rate, fixed-term deposits, payments and salary accounts. The plan was to begin with businesses and later offer consumer credit.
In July, it announced the acquisition of Warren, the Brazilian wealth management platform founded by Tito Gusmão and Marcelo Maisonnave. A price close to US$60 million was reported in Brazil. The transaction was presented as financed with internal resources, without debt or new capital contributions, and remained subject to approval by Brazil’s central bank.
Sbdar uses an image to explain what he wants from that expansion: boarding a bus in Córdoba and seeing someone who keeps their money in Cocos. He says he has no plans to sell the company. He also repeats a more immediate concern: making sure the app does not go down when customers need to use it.
Coding Without Having Been a Programmer
What he intended to demonstrate at the Movistar Arena was something he had already been testing on his own. Sbdar began developing software with artificial intelligence without having trained as a programmer. He now appears as a contributor on GitHub, where Cocos’s code is hosted.
On his own, he created rendimientos.com. He gradually added comparison tools for mutual funds, fixed-term deposit rates and UVA mortgage loans. When someone pointed out that the World Cup schedule was missing, he added that too.
At Cocos, they tested those tools in a one-day hackathon. Between fifteen and eighteen groups of around ten people participated. The winning project simplified an internal procedure involving many steps.
The idea came from a customer service employee who was able to develop it herself. That is the example Sbdar chooses to tell: someone who knew about a difficulty in her work found a way to solve it.
When asked about employment, he responds with that same enthusiasm. In his view, these tools make it possible to carry out projects that previously remained unfinished because there were not enough hours or no one knew how to code.
The Cow with the Loudspeaker
To explain how he tries to attract attention, he imagines a road trip from Corrientes to Buenos Aires. There are cows all along the way. But if one had a loudspeaker, he says, everyone would remember it.
In January 2018, he wrote to Marcos Galperin on Twitter and proposed spending a day paying for everything with QR codes. Mercado Pago responded. Sbdar found a cameraman, drove around the city in a Fiat 500 and made the advertisement without charging.
With Cocos came old cars carrying the brand’s advertisements and a huge billboard on Libertador Avenue. On social media, besides promoting the app, he debates investments.
On June 24, he called the financing structure associated with the STRC preferred shares of Strategy, Michael Saylor’s company, a Ponzi scheme. Carlos Maslatón rejected the term and described it as extreme leverage.
Sbdar later clarified that he considered the treasury vehicle transparent. His criticism focused on sustaining dividends above 10% annually based on the expectation that the underlying asset would continue rising. He himself holds 5% of his portfolio in crypto, he says, and expects Bitcoin to rise, although he avoids naming a price.
He acknowledges that exposing himself in that way is exhausting. The insults and accusations weigh on him, and he says he will shut down his social media accounts someday. For now, he is still in the office almost every day, working alongside employees. He has the Cocos logo tattooed on one arm.
