Brex Raises VC Funding As It Launches Card For Startups

Brex, the FinTech startup, announced Tuesday (June 19) that it closed a Series B round of financing, bringing the company’s total funding to $57 million. According to a company blog, Brex said the investors in this round of fundraising included Y Combinator Continuity, PayPal Founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, Facebook investor Yuri Milner, financial services VC Ribbit Capital and former Visa CEO Carl Pascarella.

Anu Hariharan, Partner with Y Combinator Continuity, said in the blog, “Brex is redefining the corporate card experience for startups of all stages. This has been a long-standing pain point for many of our founders. We are thrilled to have led the Series B round in Brex.”

In conjunction with the announcement of the fundraising, it announced a corporate card designed to help startups qualify based on funding instead of their credit history. Brex said it spent the last year working with its customers to develop a product using technology to help get around the financial and regulatory hurdles that usually prevents early-stage companies from credit card services. Brex said, with the company, startups can get instant approval on cards that offer high limits and don’t require any personal backing. The company said in its blog post that it has more than 1,000 customers and is now opening its product up to startups.

“Startups that have raised millions and are poised for hyper-growth can’t get slowed down hassling with banks requiring personal guarantees and offering meager credit limits,” said Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and CEO of Brex in the post. “Traditional credit models look at how much a company can pay back in a year based on profits, often disqualifying startups. We rebuilt the financial services tech stack from the ground up and created a new kind of card to specifically meets the needs of startups.”

According to Brex, some of the features of its card include an easy application without personal guarantee requirements and higher limits to reflect the needs of a company in growth mode, integrated expense management software, and the ability to text a picture of a receipt and have it automatically matched to the transaction.

Dalton Caldwell, a Partner with Y Combinator, added, “As a startup founder, you have so many things going on, and the last thing you want to worry about is finding a quick and easy payments solution for company expenses, let alone personally guaranteeing a card or trying to find an expense management system that works. Brex solves that.”