Founded: 2017
Headquarters: Draper, Utah
Brex is a corporate card and spend management solution that helps drive 100% compliance with 0 receipt chasing in 100+ countries. Brex is easy to use and loved by the whole team, from founders to CFOs to accountants and employees. We make it easy to manage every aspect of spending, from the smallest purchases to the biggest procurements, no matter where employees live and work. Brex proudly serves tens of thousands of growing businesses, from early-stage startups to enterprise leaders, including many of the world's most iconic brands.
Key Facts
Brex offers a full suite of products for startups and enterprises. These products include spend management, corporate cards, rewards, business accounts, integrations, financial modeling, and venture debt.
Brex delivers a modern spend management solution. Brex helps controllers and managers by providing real-time visibility and accountability across global spending, breaking down silos of separate systems, and giving accounting teams more automation and accuracy. Brex allows employee spending to be easy by providing auto-generated receipts and making it easy to understand the policy and purpose for expenses, across cards, reimbursements, and bill pay — with amounts shown in USD and local currency.
Brex provides a new all-inclusive corporate credit card. Brex’s corporate credit cards provide built-in expense management, mobile/online management, and unlimited virtual and physical cards, protected by chip and PIN in 100+ countries, the ability to auto-sync financial data and set up automated onboarding and payments with their plug-n-play integrations with QuickBooks, NetSuite, Rippling, etc., and rewards.
Brex recently changed its criteria for its corporate credit card eligibility: (1) Revenue: $1+ million per year in revenue; (2) Cash: $500,000+ in cash; (3) Size: 50+ employees; (4) Equity Investment: Any amount from an accelerator, angel, venture capital, or web3 token; (5) Referral: Tech startups on a path to meeting these criteria and are referred by an existing customer or partner.
Brex rewards are designed to help founders at every stage of growth. As the Company built Brex’s rewards program, it spoke with founders to understand their needs at various stages in their startup's lifecycle and the role that Brex rewards could play in helping founders and startups as they scale.
Brex allows business to choose their rewards, such as redeeming points for billboards, coaching, retreat planning, statement credit, mental healthcare, travel points, cryptocurrency, and even sending aid to Ukraine.
Brex offers best-in-class point multipliers based on the merchant category of the transaction. 1x = 1 point earned for every dollar spent. Brex points are uncapped and never expire.
Customers with a Brex Cash account that make daily payments on their card earn the highest rewards: 8x on rideshare, 5x on Travel, 4x on restaurants, 3x on eligible Apple purchases through the Brex Rewards Portal, 1.5x on ads, and 1x on everything else.
Brex Exclusive is a rewards status that gives you access to the highest multipliers available, automatically applied to your account when you make Brex the exclusive corporate card for your business. A company with a Brex account in good standing that uses and commits to continue to use Brex corporate cards for all its company-related card purchases may be permitted to participate in the Brex Exclusive rewards program. Eligibility is determined on a rolling, monthly basis.
Brex does not charge fees or interest on Brex cards. Instead, they simply receive a small fee from the merchant for each purchase a company makes with their card.
Brex’s business accounts store funds securely in a Brex account that’s FDIC-insured up to $1 million and provides easy management of card expenses with built-in software. Brex business accounts allow customers to send global ACH and wires from anywhere, use mobile financial management, track cash across multiple accounts, pay bills automatically, and make informed decisions with quick insights.
Brex provides thousands of integrations to automate workflows. Brex integrates with all the company’s existing software so they can manage their business with ease from one place. Brex’s integrations boost efficiency with auto-categorized expense data, smoother payroll, and built-in alerts.
Brex connects with the top 35 HR and identity platforms to automatically issue cards and adjust spending amounts when employees join, switch roles, or leave.
Brex enables continuous reconciliation, automatically syncing customers’ Brex data across systems in real-time. Using the most current data, the company’s finance teams can make more informed decisions.
Brex’s financial modeling allows companies to plan for various financial scenarios and create interactive dashboards backed by real-time financial data.
Brex’s venture debt offers founder-friendly financing and a unique strategic partnership. Brex’s venture debt is designed for early-stage, venture-backed technology companies with a product market fit, recurring revenue base, and scalable business model.
In early 2022, Brex announced it is making a “big push” into software, which means its revenue generation will be more diversified as it will now be making money off recurring revenue from subscriptions to its software, in addition to interchange fees. Brex is also placing greater emphasis on moving upmarket to serve larger customers.
According to TechCrunch, Brex saw 100% year-over-year growth in 2021. The company is still focused on growth and not yet profitable.
Brex’s Series D2 financing will be used to bolster Brex’s product, which is the only corporate payments solution that can be customized for specific business verticals. With this new capital, Brex will be expanding its corporate spend management features and rewards offerings, while also expanding its services to a broader customer audience.
By offering a distinct combination of payment terms, underwriting, rewards offerings, and product features to specific customer segments within the business landscape, Brex is challenging the financial services industry status quo.
In June 2022, Brex announced it would stop serving small businesses (defined as those who haven’t raised venture capital). Brex executives chose to focus on its larger startup customers, the segment responsible for the vast majority of the company’s business. Total revenue from all businesses dropped was less than 2%. “Even though it was a large number of companies [that fell away], it was very small companies,” said CEO Henrique Dubugras.
In August 2022, Brex announced the appointment of Doug Adamic as its Chief Revenue Officer. Doug will lead the revenue and growth strategy for Brex as the company expands into financial software and grows its global offerings for venture-backed startups, mid-market companies, and larger enterprises.
In October 2022, Brex announced that it laid off 11% of the company's workforce. The layoffs were due to multiple factors such as the company's strategic pivot and the macroeconomic climate. According to CEO Henrique Dubugras, the layoffs put the company on track for profitability.
In October 2022, Brex announced its partnership with AngelList to help founders effortlessly manage their corporate card and spend within AngelList Stack — a suite of tools that allows founders to manage their company’s incorporation, cap table, fundraising, and employees all in a single location. “By integrating with AngelList, we’re thrilled to now be positioned to help founders scale from MVP to IPO and beyond even faster,” said CEO Henrique Dubugras.
In November 2022, Brex announced its partnership with Techstars, a global investment business that provides access to capital, one-on-one mentorship, and customized programming for early-stage entrepreneurs. As part of the partnership, Brex has joined Techstars’ global network of partners and will offer aspiring founders and early-stage entrepreneurs exclusive resources to help them scale their businesses.
In November 2022, Brex announced the launch of Catharsis, a new program designed to support startup founders’ mental health. According to a study by the National Institute of Mental Health, 72% of entrepreneurs are directly or indirectly affected by mental health issues. With 1 in 4 startups in the U.S. using Brex today, the company is focused on helping this community navigate the unique challenges often experienced by startup founders.
In March 2023, Brex announced it will be launching advanced AI-powered tools for CFOs and their teams, all built using advanced machine learning and natural language processing technology from OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company.
In March 2023, Brex announced Brex travel, a premium travel management experience that delivers comprehensive booking and management capabilities, all in the Brex dashboard and mobile app, with unbiased global inventory, self-service trip changes, and 24/7 agent support.
According to Bloomberg as of May 2023, Brex's firmwide annual recurring revenue is approximately $500 million, a ~50% increase year-over-year. The company has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue for both its business accounts unit and Empower, its spend management business. Brex’s cash management accounts have continued to grow in part because it’s able to insure up to $6 million in deposits. Co-CEO Dubugras told Bloomberg that Brex could become profitable within two years, and the company has no intention of raising more venture capital this year.