Brex é uma fintech de cartões de crédito corporativos fundada em 2017 pelo paulista Henrique Dubugras e pelo carioca Pedro Franceschi, ambos nascidos em 1996. Antes da Brex, a dupla já havia criado a startup de pagamentos Pagar.me. São pouco falados no Brasil por uma razão muito simples: eles criaram a Brex no Vale do Silício.
Os empreendedores foram criados na cultura hacker. Dubugras começou a programar aos 12 anos, quando fez uma cópia de um game e começou a vender para interessados, até que uma notificação de quebra de patente o fez encerrar seu servidor pirata. Franceschi também sabia hackear: desbloqueou o iPhone 3G e fez a Siri, assistente pessoal da Apple, falar português antes que o recurso estivesse disponível.
Ambos deram o salto da programação ao empreendedorismo por volta dos 16 anos. Em São Paulo, Dubugras criou a Estudar nos EUA, empresa que ajudava brasileiros a se candidatar a universidades americanas, e depois o AskMeAout, um "tinder" feito de amigos no Facebook. Enquanto isso, no Rio de Janeiro, Franceschi criava o Quasar, um gerenciador de janelas para tablet iPad.
Os dois se conheceram em uma discussão no Twitter e começaram a trocar ideias de negócio. Mesmo morando em cidades diferentes, fundaram a empresa de processamento Pagar.me em 2013, antes de terminar o ensino médio. O negócio foi criado a partir de um programa de aceleração e deu certo. Com meses de operação, a Pagar.me recebeu um investimento semente de 1 milhão de dólares da Arpex Capital, fundo que tem como sócio Jorge Paulo Lemann, da empresa de participações 3G, controladora de marcas como Burger King e Kraft-Heinz. Após três anos, já com mais de 100 funcionários e 1,5 bilhão de dólares transacionados para empresas como Magazine Luiza, a Pagar.me foi adquirida pela Stone Pagamentos por um valor não divulgado. A intenção da Stone era combinar produtos financeiros para clientes corporativos e software de gestão em uma única plataforma.
Os empreendedores foram criados na cultura hacker. Dubugras começou a programar aos 12 anos, quando fez uma cópia de um game e começou a vender para interessados, até que uma notificação de quebra de patente o fez encerrar seu servidor pirata. Franceschi também sabia hackear: desbloqueou o iPhone 3G e fez a Siri, assistente pessoal da Apple, falar português antes que o recurso estivesse disponível.
Ambos deram o salto da programação ao empreendedorismo por volta dos 16 anos. Em São Paulo, Dubugras criou a Estudar nos EUA, empresa que ajudava brasileiros a se candidatar a universidades americanas, e depois o AskMeAout, um "tinder" feito de amigos no Facebook. Enquanto isso, no Rio de Janeiro, Franceschi criava o Quasar, um gerenciador de janelas para tablet iPad.
Os dois se conheceram em uma discussão no Twitter e começaram a trocar ideias de negócio. Mesmo morando em cidades diferentes, fundaram a empresa de processamento Pagar.me em 2013, antes de terminar o ensino médio. O negócio foi criado a partir de um programa de aceleração e deu certo. Com meses de operação, a Pagar.me recebeu um investimento semente de 1 milhão de dólares da Arpex Capital, fundo que tem como sócio Jorge Paulo Lemann, da empresa de participações 3G, controladora de marcas como Burger King e Kraft-Heinz. Após três anos, já com mais de 100 funcionários e 1,5 bilhão de dólares transacionados para empresas como Magazine Luiza, a Pagar.me foi adquirida pela Stone Pagamentos por um valor não divulgado. A intenção da Stone era combinar produtos financeiros para clientes corporativos e software de gestão em uma única plataforma.
Em 2016, a dupla foi estudar na Universidade Stanford. Lá, viram como colegas empreendedores não conseguiam obter cartões de crédito corporativo com os bancos tradicionais. Largaram Stanford em menos de um ano para se dedicar à criação de um negócio que cobrisse essa falha de mercado.
Criada em março de 2017, a Brex se diferencia por olhar os investimentos recebidos e o fluxo de caixa das startups na hora de conceder cartões de crédito. Bancos tradicionais se baseiam no histórico financeiro das empresas e dos indivíduos - no caso dos jovens imigrantes, como os próprios Dubugras e Franceschi, tais dados inexistem. Os cartões da Brex chegam ao cliente em poucos dias, com um limite de dez a 20 vezes maior do que o oferecido pelos de bancos e há facilidades como envio de recibos por foto e navegação intuitiva dos extratos.
Em 20 meses de operação, a Brex levantou mais de 200 milhões de dólares. O aporte fechado em 5 de outubro de 2018, elevou a empresa ao status de unicórnio. Alguns dos investidores são novamente Lemann, Peter Thiel (cofundador do PayPal) e fundos conhecidos de brasileiros, como DST Global (Rappi e Nubank), Greenoaks Capital (Yellow) e Ribbit Capital (Nubank).
Criada em março de 2017, a Brex se diferencia por olhar os investimentos recebidos e o fluxo de caixa das startups na hora de conceder cartões de crédito. Bancos tradicionais se baseiam no histórico financeiro das empresas e dos indivíduos - no caso dos jovens imigrantes, como os próprios Dubugras e Franceschi, tais dados inexistem. Os cartões da Brex chegam ao cliente em poucos dias, com um limite de dez a 20 vezes maior do que o oferecido pelos de bancos e há facilidades como envio de recibos por foto e navegação intuitiva dos extratos.
Em 20 meses de operação, a Brex levantou mais de 200 milhões de dólares. O aporte fechado em 5 de outubro de 2018, elevou a empresa ao status de unicórnio. Alguns dos investidores são novamente Lemann, Peter Thiel (cofundador do PayPal) e fundos conhecidos de brasileiros, como DST Global (Rappi e Nubank), Greenoaks Capital (Yellow) e Ribbit Capital (Nubank).
Após um aporte de US$ 300 milhões, realizado em janeiro de 2022, a startup foi avaliada em US$ 12,3 bilhões. O crescimento da empresa foi de 200% na comparação com 2021.
A empresa está executando uma postura focada em eficiência financeira para alcançar maior rentabilidade. Reduziu seu quadro de funcionários em 11% em outubro de 2022, fez parcerias estratégicas e adquiriu outros negócios para qualificar seus serviços.
No início de 2023, a fintech foi uma das beneficiadas pelo colapso do Silicon Valley Bank e outros bancos americanos de médio porte. A fintech ampliou a base de clientes, que até no início do ano era de 200 mil empresas sediadas nos EUA e em mais de 100 países.
Em 2023, a fintech foi destacada como a segundo empresa mais disruptiva do Vale do Silício, entre 50 negócios, segundo o tradicional levantamento do site da rede de televisão americana CNBC. "O que diferenciou a Brex do 'status quo' em cartões corporativos é o seu foco em empresas de rápido crescimento. A startup fintech oferece limites mais altos, opções de recompensa, incluindo coaching e masterclasses personalizadas para fundadores, e software avançado de gerenciamento de gastos que ajusta os limites de crédito com base em saldos de caixa e receitas', destacou a publicação.No início de 2023, a fintech foi uma das beneficiadas pelo colapso do Silicon Valley Bank e outros bancos americanos de médio porte. A fintech ampliou a base de clientes, que até no início do ano era de 200 mil empresas sediadas nos EUA e em mais de 100 países.
(Fonte: revista Exame - 31.10.2018 / Época Negócios - 06.04.2022 / Valor - 06.10.2023 - partes)
English version - In short
Brex is the first corporate credit card for startups. It was founded by Brazilian-born Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, two engineers who previously founded Pagar.me, one of the largest payment processors in Brazil with over $1.5 billion in GMV. The company was founded in March 2017 (it only launched publicly in June 2018). Its headquarters is located in San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US.
Brex is backed by the co-founders of PayPal (Max Levchin and Peter Thiel), Y Combinator, Ribbit Capital, Yuri Milner, and Carl Pascarella (former CEO of Visa). Brex is building the next generation of B2B financial services with better tech and without the restrictions of legacy technology.
English version
When Brazilian-born Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi met at 16 years old, they bonded over a love of coding and mutual frustrations with their strict mothers, who didn’t understand their Mark Zuckerberg-esque ambitions.
To be fair, their moms’ fear of their hacking habits only escalated after their pre-teen sons were each sent notices of patent infringement. A legal threat from Apple, which Franceschi received after discovering the first jailbreak to the iPhone, is enough to warrant a grounding, at the very least.
Their parents implored them to quit the hacking and stop messing around online. They didn’t listen.
Today, the now 22-year-olds are announcing a $125 million Series C for their second successful payments business, called Brex, at a $1.1 billion valuation. Greenoaks Capital, DST Global and IVP led the round, which brings their total raised to date to about $200 million.
San Francisco-based Brex provides startup founders access to corporate credit cards without a personal guarantee or deposit. It’s also supported by the likes of PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, the former chief executive officer of Visa Carl Pascarella and a handful of leading venture capital firms.
"Brex is … one of the most exciting starts we’ve ever seen,” IVP’s Somesh Dash said in a statement.
The financing makes them some of the youngest unicorn founders in history and puts them in a rare class of startups that have galloped into unicorn territory at such a fast clip. Brex was founded in the winter of 2017. It only launched publicly in June 2018.
“I’ve had two failed attempts, one successful attempt and one on the way to being a successful attempt,” Brex CEO Dubugras told TechCrunch while reciting a lengthy resume.
At 14, when most of us were worrying about what the first year of high school would bring us, Dubugras was more concerned about what his next business attempt would be. He had already built a successful online game but was forced to shut it down after receiving those patent infringement notices.
Naturally, he used the cash he earned from the game to start a company — an education startup meant to help Brazilian students apply to American schools. He himself was hoping to get into Stanford and had learned quickly how little Brazilian students understood of the U.S. college application process
In some respects, the company was a success. It garnered 800,000 users but failed to make any money. His small fortune wasn’t enough to scale the business.
“There aren’t a lot of VCs in Brazil that are willing to fund 15-year-olds,” Dubugras told TechCrunch.
Shortly after folding the edtech, he met Franceschi, a Brazilian teen from Rio — Dubugras is from São Paulo — who understood his appetite for innovation and was just as hungry for success. The pair got to talking and because of Franceschi’s interest in payments, they started Pagar.me, the “Stripe of Brazil.”
Pagar.me raised $30 million, amassed a staff of 100 and was processing up to $1.5 billion in transactions when it sold. Finally, they had a real success under their belt. Now it was time to relocate.
“We wanted to come to Silicon Valley to build stuff because everything here seemed so big and so cool,” Dubugras said.
And come to Silicon Valley they did. In the fall of 2016, the pair enrolled at Stanford. Shortly after that, they entered Y Combinator with big dreams for a virtual reality startup called Beyond.
“I think three weeks in we gave it up,” Dubugras said. “We realized we aren’t the right founders to start this business.”
He credits Y Combinator with helping him realize what they were good at — payments.
As founders themselves, Dubugras and Franceschi were hyper-aware of a huge problem entrepreneurs face: access to credit. Big banks see small businesses as a risk they aren’t willing to take, so founders are often left at a dead-end. Dubugras and Franceschi not only had a big network of startup entrepreneurs in their Rolodex, but they had the fintech acumen necessary to build a credit card business designed specifically for founders.
So, they scrapped Beyond and in April 2017, Brex was born. The startup picked up momentum quickly, so much so that the pair decided to drop out of Stanford and pursue the business full time.
Brex doesn’t require any kind of personal guarantee or security deposit and it doesn’t use third-party legacy technology; its software platform is built from scratch.
It simplifies a lot of the frustrating parts of corporate expenses by providing companies with a consolidated look at their spending. At the end of each month, for example, a CEO can easily see how much the entire company spent on Uber.
Plus, Brex can give entrepreneurs a credit limit that’s as much as 10 times higher than what they’d receive elsewhere and they can issue cards, virtual cards at least, moments after the online application is complete.
“We have a very similar effect of what Stripe had in the beginning, but much faster because Silicon Valley companies are very good at spending money but making money is harder,” Dubugras explained.
As part of their funding announcement, Brex said it will launch a rewards program built with the needs and spending patterns of founders in mind. Beyond that, they plan to use the capital to hire engineers and figure out how to grow the business’s client base beyond only tech startups.
“We want to dominate corporate credit cards,” Dubugras said. “We want every single company in the world, whenever they do businesses expenses, to do it on a Brex card.”
(Kate Clark@kateclarktweets-LinkedIn - October 6th 2018)
When Brazilian-born Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi met at 16 years old, they bonded over a love of coding and mutual frustrations with their strict mothers, who didn’t understand their Mark Zuckerberg-esque ambitions.
To be fair, their moms’ fear of their hacking habits only escalated after their pre-teen sons were each sent notices of patent infringement. A legal threat from Apple, which Franceschi received after discovering the first jailbreak to the iPhone, is enough to warrant a grounding, at the very least.
Their parents implored them to quit the hacking and stop messing around online. They didn’t listen.
Today, the now 22-year-olds are announcing a $125 million Series C for their second successful payments business, called Brex, at a $1.1 billion valuation. Greenoaks Capital, DST Global and IVP led the round, which brings their total raised to date to about $200 million.
San Francisco-based Brex provides startup founders access to corporate credit cards without a personal guarantee or deposit. It’s also supported by the likes of PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, the former chief executive officer of Visa Carl Pascarella and a handful of leading venture capital firms.
"Brex is … one of the most exciting starts we’ve ever seen,” IVP’s Somesh Dash said in a statement.
The financing makes them some of the youngest unicorn founders in history and puts them in a rare class of startups that have galloped into unicorn territory at such a fast clip. Brex was founded in the winter of 2017. It only launched publicly in June 2018.
“I’ve had two failed attempts, one successful attempt and one on the way to being a successful attempt,” Brex CEO Dubugras told TechCrunch while reciting a lengthy resume.
At 14, when most of us were worrying about what the first year of high school would bring us, Dubugras was more concerned about what his next business attempt would be. He had already built a successful online game but was forced to shut it down after receiving those patent infringement notices.
Naturally, he used the cash he earned from the game to start a company — an education startup meant to help Brazilian students apply to American schools. He himself was hoping to get into Stanford and had learned quickly how little Brazilian students understood of the U.S. college application process
In some respects, the company was a success. It garnered 800,000 users but failed to make any money. His small fortune wasn’t enough to scale the business.
“There aren’t a lot of VCs in Brazil that are willing to fund 15-year-olds,” Dubugras told TechCrunch.
Shortly after folding the edtech, he met Franceschi, a Brazilian teen from Rio — Dubugras is from São Paulo — who understood his appetite for innovation and was just as hungry for success. The pair got to talking and because of Franceschi’s interest in payments, they started Pagar.me, the “Stripe of Brazil.”
Pagar.me raised $30 million, amassed a staff of 100 and was processing up to $1.5 billion in transactions when it sold. Finally, they had a real success under their belt. Now it was time to relocate.
“We wanted to come to Silicon Valley to build stuff because everything here seemed so big and so cool,” Dubugras said.
And come to Silicon Valley they did. In the fall of 2016, the pair enrolled at Stanford. Shortly after that, they entered Y Combinator with big dreams for a virtual reality startup called Beyond.
“I think three weeks in we gave it up,” Dubugras said. “We realized we aren’t the right founders to start this business.”
He credits Y Combinator with helping him realize what they were good at — payments.
As founders themselves, Dubugras and Franceschi were hyper-aware of a huge problem entrepreneurs face: access to credit. Big banks see small businesses as a risk they aren’t willing to take, so founders are often left at a dead-end. Dubugras and Franceschi not only had a big network of startup entrepreneurs in their Rolodex, but they had the fintech acumen necessary to build a credit card business designed specifically for founders.
So, they scrapped Beyond and in April 2017, Brex was born. The startup picked up momentum quickly, so much so that the pair decided to drop out of Stanford and pursue the business full time.
Brex doesn’t require any kind of personal guarantee or security deposit and it doesn’t use third-party legacy technology; its software platform is built from scratch.
It simplifies a lot of the frustrating parts of corporate expenses by providing companies with a consolidated look at their spending. At the end of each month, for example, a CEO can easily see how much the entire company spent on Uber.
Plus, Brex can give entrepreneurs a credit limit that’s as much as 10 times higher than what they’d receive elsewhere and they can issue cards, virtual cards at least, moments after the online application is complete.
“We have a very similar effect of what Stripe had in the beginning, but much faster because Silicon Valley companies are very good at spending money but making money is harder,” Dubugras explained.
As part of their funding announcement, Brex said it will launch a rewards program built with the needs and spending patterns of founders in mind. Beyond that, they plan to use the capital to hire engineers and figure out how to grow the business’s client base beyond only tech startups.
“We want to dominate corporate credit cards,” Dubugras said. “We want every single company in the world, whenever they do businesses expenses, to do it on a Brex card.”
(Kate Clark@kateclarktweets-LinkedIn - October 6th 2018)
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