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Brex sells corporate credit cards and spend-management software to startups and businesses, making money mostly from the fees merchants pay when cards are swiped.
Brex is a financial technology company that gives businesses a way to spend money and keep track of it. Its core products are corporate credit cards and a software dashboard where finance teams can see every purchase, set spending limits, and close the books faster. The customers are mostly startups, mid-sized companies, and increasingly larger enterprises — the kind of firms that want a modern card and software stack instead of a traditional bank's clunky expense tools.
Here is how it makes money. When a company's employee swipes a Brex card, the merchant pays a small fee to the card network, and Brex takes a cut of that interchange. That is the engine. On top of it, Brex sells software subscriptions and paid tiers, and it earns interest and fees from banking-like services such as business accounts and treasury. Customers pick Brex over a plain bank card because the software is genuinely useful: receipts match to transactions automatically, budgets update in real time, and managers can approve spending before it happens rather than chasing paperwork afterward. Brex started in 2017 by targeting startups that traditional banks often ignored because they had no credit history or collateral. The founders — Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, Brazilian entrepreneurs who had already built and sold a payments company — famously dropped out of Stanford to build it, and the early pitch was a card that required no personal guarantee and no deposit. That made it wildly popular in Silicon Valley, and the company grew fast during the startup boom, reaching a valuation of over $12 billion in 2022. It has since pushed beyond startups into bigger companies and expanded its software.
The business is not without risk. Brex makes much of its money from interchange, so it is tied to how much customers spend, and a downturn or a pullback in startup spending hits revenue. It also faces competition from traditional banks, from expense-software players, and from newer fintech rivals, which keeps pressure on pricing. Brex has spent heavily on product development and acquisitions to broaden its platform, and like many growth-stage fintechs it has had to manage its path toward sustainable profitability as the easy money era ended.
Saved answer · last researched 4 Nov 2026