Brex Valuation and Revenue: From $12.3B to a $5.15B Sale

Brex's latest valuation is $5.15 billion.

That is the price Capital One agreed to pay for the company in a cash-and-stock deal that Capital One announced on January 22, 2026. The deal closed on April 7, 2026, and Brex now runs as part of Capital One with co-founder Pedro Franceschi still CEO.

The price is less than half of the $12.3 billion Brex was valued at in its January 2022 Series D-2 round. With about half paid in Capital One shares, the value at closing came in lower still: Capital One's Q2 2026 quarterly filing puts the consideration at about $4.5 billion.

On revenue, the latest public figure is $700 million in gross annualized revenue, growing 50% a year, which Franceschi shared in September 2025 alongside a Financial Times feature. In January 2026, a Brex spokesperson told Crunchbase News the business was growing 40% year over year and was profitable. Capital One does not report Brex's revenue separately.

Brex grew because it gave startups a corporate card that banks would not, built its own card and banking stack underneath it, and then, after nearly stalling in 2022 and 2023, cut back hard and moved up to bigger and more global customers. Its rival Ramp grew much faster over the same years, and Brex ended up selling to a bank instead of going public.

Here is how it happened.

Brex's growth in one table

Date	Milestone
Winter 2017	Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi join Y Combinator with a VR idea, then drop it
April 2017	Brex is founded; raises a $6.5M Series A at a $25M valuation
June 2018	Public launch of the startup corporate card, with 1,000+ customers
October 2018	Raises $125M Series C at a $1.1B valuation
June 2019	Raises $100M Series C-2 at a $2.6B valuation
May 2020	Raises a $150M Series C extension at about a $2.9B pre-money valuation
April 2021	Raises $425M Series D at a $7.4B valuation, led by Tiger Global
January 2022	Raises $300M Series D-2 at a $12.3B valuation, its peak
April 2022	Launches Empower spend management software, with DoorDash as an early customer
June 2022	Tells "tens of thousands" of small businesses it will close their accounts
March 2023	Adds about 4,000 customers and $2B in deposits in the week Silicon Valley Bank fails
Q4 2023	Annualized net revenue reported at $279M, up 32%
January 2024	Lays off 282 people (about 20%) and launches "Brex 3.0"
June 2024	Franceschi becomes sole CEO; Dubugras becomes board chair
August 2025	Wins an EU payments license; grows 49% and is operating-cash-flow positive for the first time
September 2025	Franceschi says Brex has hit $700M in gross annualized revenue
January 2026	Capital One agrees to buy Brex for $5.15B
April 2026	Deal closes; consideration at closing is about $4.5B
October 2026	Brex signs a 93,779-square-foot New York office lease

1. Brex gave startup founders a card banks would not

Dubugras and Franceschi met as 16-year-olds in Brazil and built Pagar.me, a payments processor that TechCrunch described as the "Stripe of Brazil." It raised $30 million and had about 100 staff when it sold.

They enrolled at Stanford in fall 2016 and joined Y Combinator with a virtual reality startup. "I think three weeks in we gave it up," Dubugras told TechCrunch.

The problem they picked instead was one they could see around them. New startups often could not get a corporate card, because banks wanted a credit history, a personal guarantee from the founder, or a cash deposit.

Brex did away with all three. It launched publicly in June 2018 with a card that qualified startups based on their funding rather than credit history, with no personal guarantee. Brex said it already had more than 1,000 customers and a two-minute application.

TechCrunch reported that Brex could offer limits as much as 10 times higher than founders would get elsewhere.

The early growth was fast. Franceschi later wrote on Brex's blog that the company went "from 0 to $100MM ARR in 16 months." Dubugras told TechCrunch in 2021 that Brex reached $1 billion in total payment volume within its first seven months.

2. Brex raised big rounds early and used them as a balance sheet

Few Silicon Valley companies had reached a multibillion-dollar valuation as quickly, Bloomberg noted in 2019. Brex went from a $25 million valuation in April 2017 to $1.1 billion in October 2018, according to the funding history TechCrunch published in 2019.

That $125 million Series C, led by Greenoaks Capital, DST Global and IVP, made the 22-year-old founders some of the youngest unicorn founders in history. Brex had launched publicly only four months earlier.

Eight months later, Kleiner Perkins led a $100 million round at $2.6 billion. Dubugras told Axios he saw it as a "repricing event."

He also explained why a card company wanted so much equity. "Our banks — our partners — like us to have a lot of equity sitting there in case something goes wrong," he told TechCrunch. Brex had also taken a $100 million debt line from Barclays in April 2019, according to its own announcement.

The money kept coming. Brex raised a $150 million extension in May 2020. Tiger Global then led a $425 million Series D at $7.4 billion in April 2021.

In January 2022 came a $300 million Series D-2 at $12.3 billion, which brought Brex's total raised to $1.2 billion. In May 2022 it also closed a $250 million employee tender offer at the same valuation.

3. Brex built its own stack from the card rails up

Many fintech card companies are built on top of third-party issuing platforms. Brex took the slower route.

Franceschi told TechCrunch in 2024 that Brex was "vertically integrated down to the Mastercard rails and the ACH rails and the money movement rails." Competitors built on platforms such as Stripe or Marqeta could handle simple cases, he argued, but global coverage needed deeper control.

The bet let Brex serve companies with staff in many countries. By 2024, Brex said it offered locally issued cards, local settlement and local reimbursements in 50+ countries.

It also became the main reason Capital One bought Brex. Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank said on the deal call that most fintechs use third-party technology, but Brex had built "a full modern tech stack from the bottom up."

4. Brex moved from a card to a software suite

A card earns interchange, the fee merchants pay on each swipe. That was Brex's main revenue source, and Franceschi told TechCrunch in 2024 that it still was.

But Brex kept adding products to sell alongside the card. Dubugras was at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019 launching Brex Cash, a business account for startups.

In April 2021 it bundled cards, cash accounts, spend management and bill pay into Brex Premium for $49 a month. A year later it replaced Premium with Brex Empower, a spend management platform built around budgets, policies and reviewing only the expenses that break the rules.

DoorDash, then worth more than $36 billion, was one of Empower's first customers. "DoorDash is the first of many," Dubugras told TechCrunch. The software gave Brex subscription revenue and a reason for larger companies to choose it.

5. Brex dropped tens of thousands of small businesses

In June 2022, Brex told a large group of customers it would close their accounts by August 15.

Dubugras told TechCrunch that "tens of thousands" of businesses were affected. Most were bakeries, restaurants, small design agencies and other businesses without "professional" funding from VCs, angels or accelerators.

Brex had started serving these traditional small businesses in late 2019. Dubugras later said onboarding jumped from a few hundred startups a month to 5,000 or 10,000 small businesses a month, and "everything started breaking."

At the same time, startups that had grown up on Brex were asking for features it did not have. "We realized that if we didn't choose one, we would do a poor job for both," Dubugras told CNBC.

The announcement went badly. Franceschi wrote on Brex's blog that the company "did a poor job explaining this decision," then published clear criteria: any equity funding, more than $1 million in revenue, more than 50 employees, or more than $500,000 in cash.

The revenue hit was small. Dubugras told Banking Dive that total revenue fell less than 2%, because the businesses that left were very small.

The reputational hit was bigger. Dubugras said Brex "took a huge reputation hit" and that it would be "very hard for us to go back into that segment." Four months later, Brex laid off 136 people, about 11% of staff, many of them in roles that had served those customers.

6. The SVB collapse sent Brex 4,000 customers in a week

Brex's focus on venture-backed startups paid off unexpectedly in March 2023, when startups pulled money out of a failing Silicon Valley Bank. Axios reported that Brex took in 4,000 customers and $2 billion in deposits between March 9 and 16, 2023.

Brex moved quickly. It raised FDIC insurance on its business accounts from $1 million to $6 million by spreading deposits across nine partner banks, and offered emergency credit lines to SVB customers worried about payroll, according to its own update.

The customers stayed. A year later, Axios reported that more than 90% of the companies that joined that week were still active, and that Brex managed about $7 billion in customer deposits, up from about $3 billion before the crisis.

But the boost did not last. TechCrunch reported that higher interest rates and slower VC funding meant many startup customers were spending less. Brex's annualized net revenue was $279 million in the fourth quarter of 2023, up 32%, with most of that growth in the first quarter.

7. Brex 3.0 cut layers, cut burn and put one person in charge

In January 2024, Franceschi announced that 282 people, about 20% of the company, would leave Brex. "I realized we grew our org too quickly," he wrote.

Brex also removed two layers of management and replaced team-level planning with "One Roadmap," a single company plan where Franceschi was "the ultimate editor of what ships," he later wrote.

The leadership team changed almost completely. COO Michael Tannenbaum moved to the board, Camilla Morais became COO, and CTO Cosmin Nicolaescu moved to an advisory role, according to TechCrunch.

In June 2024, the two founders ended their co-CEO setup. Franceschi became sole CEO and Dubugras became board chair. "I think we're at a scale where we're starting to see some of the cracks in the co-CEO model," Dubugras told TechCrunch.

The turnaround worked on paper. By late 2024, Franceschi said on Brex's blog that revenue growth had accelerated almost 3 times, net revenue retention was up more than 15 points, and burn was down almost 70%.

In August 2025, Brex grew 49% and was operating-cash-flow positive for the first time, Franceschi told staff in a memo titled "The turnaround is over." He listed what it had taken: a big layoff, a new leadership team, "resetting our internal valuation," spikes in attrition and a return to the office.

8. Brex went upmarket and abroad

After 2022, Brex's fastest-growing segment was large companies.

Franceschi said on Brex's blog that the enterprise business grew 91% in 2024 with net revenue retention above 130%. Brex said customers included Anthropic, Coinbase, DoorDash, Robinhood and Wiz, and that more than 150 public companies ran on Brex.

Brex also moved beyond tech. Fairbank said on the Capital One deal call that 60% of Brex's originations over the previous two years had been to non-tech companies.

Global reach was the main selling point. In August 2025, Brex secured an EU payment institution license through the Netherlands, letting it issue cards directly to EU-based companies. Brex said nearly half its customers operated in more than one country.

Franceschi told the Financial Times that Europe could be worth up to $5 billion a year in added revenue, according to PYMNTS' summary of the interview.

9. Brex sold through other companies' software

Selling directly to every finance team is slow. In September 2024, Brex added a second route with Brex Embedded, which lets other software companies put Brex virtual cards inside their own products.

The launch partners were Sabre, the travel technology company, and Coupa, the procurement software company. Brex said customers including DoorDash and Scale AI were already processing nearly $1 billion in annualized payment volume through Embedded.

"This fundamentally opens up a big way of going to market through these other partners versus only selling directly," Brex executive Karandeep Anand said, according to Payments Dive.

10. Brex sold to Capital One for distribution

By 2025, Brex was growing again and planning an IPO. In a February 2025 Bloomberg interview republished by The Star, Franceschi said "it's easy to go public, it's hard to be a public company with low volatility and very high predictability."

But the valuation still lagged its 2022 peak. Axios reported in October 2025 that Brex had informally discussed a down round with investors that year and then broken off the talks.

Three months later, Brex agreed to sell. Franceschi framed it as a way to get scale, pointing to Capital One's "$6B marketing budget, and a $6B R&D budget" in his note to the Brex team.

"We didn't have to pursue this acquisition, our growth was incredibly strong," he told CNBC.

Brex was not fully absorbed. Franceschi kept running it and reports to Capital One executive Frank LaPrade, he wrote in the same note. Capital One reports Brex inside its Domestic Card business, and its 10-Q filing shows it paid off about $1.1 billion of Brex debt right after closing.

Early signs from inside Capital One are positive but vague. In July 2026, Fairbank said Brex was benefiting from Capital One's brand and lower funding costs, and that a program sharing leads with Brex was showing "very promising early results," according to the Q2 2026 call transcript.

Brex is still shipping and hiring. In October 2026 it added 19 new actions that let customers manage cards from inside Claude and ChatGPT. The same month, Commercial Observer reported that Brex had signed a 93,779-square-foot lease in Manhattan.

How fast did Brex grow?

Brex has never published audited revenue. The figures below mix company statements and press reports, and they use different measures, so they are not a clean series.

Brex revenue by year

2017 to 2018: Brex says it reached $100 million in ARR within 16 months of starting.
March 2020 to March 2021: Dubugras told TechCrunch that revenue and payment volume more than doubled.
2021: Revenue "more than doubled," Dubugras told TechCrunch in January 2022.
2022: Dropping small businesses cut revenue by less than 2%, Dubugras told Banking Dive. Brex did not disclose a full-year figure.
2023: A Brex spokesperson told TechCrunch revenue grew 35%+ and gross profit grew 75%. TechCrunch also reported annualized net revenue of $279 million in Q4 2023.
2024: Brex said revenue growth accelerated almost 3 times and enterprise grew 91%.
2025 forecast: Brex expected about $500 million in annual net revenue, a person familiar with its plans told Bloomberg and The Information, as cited by TechCrunch. Brex did not confirm it.
August 2025: $700 million in gross annualized revenue, growing 50%, per Franceschi.
January 2026: Growing 40% year over year and profitable, per a Brex spokesperson speaking to Crunchbase News.

The word gross matters here. The $279 million and $500 million figures are net revenue, while the $700 million figure is gross annualized revenue, so the jump between them is not all growth.

Brex funding by round

Round	Date	Amount	Valuation	Lead or key investors
Series A	April 2017	$6.5M	$25M	Ribbit Capital
Series B	April 2018	$50M	$220M	YC Continuity, Ribbit, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin
Series C	October 2018	$125M	$1.1B	Greenoaks, DST Global, IVP
Series C-2	June 2019	$100M	$2.6B	Kleiner Perkins Digital Growth
Series C extension	May 2020	$150M	~$2.9B pre-money	DST Global, Lone Pine
Series D	April 2021	$425M	$7.4B	Tiger Global
Series D-2	January 2022	$300M	$12.3B	Greenoaks, TCV
Employee tender	May 2022	$250M	$12.3B	Y Combinator
Acquisition	January 2026	—	$5.15B	Capital One

The Series A to C-2 figures come from TechCrunch's 2019 funding history; TechCrunch's 2026 deal coverage rounds the Series A to $7 million. Crunchbase News puts total funding at $1.7 billion in equity and debt, about $1.2 billion of it venture funding.

The sale split Brex's investors. TechCrunch estimated that early backers such as Ribbit made "somewhere in the neighborhood of 700-fold," while funds that invested at $7.4 billion or higher sold below their entry price.

Brex vs Ramp: how the rival pulled ahead

Ramp, founded in 2019, was "following part of the early Brex playbook with its own software twist," TechCrunch wrote in 2022. The same piece noted that Brex and Airbase charged for their spend software while Ramp did not.

In April 2021, Ramp was valued at $1.6 billion, less than a quarter of Brex's $7.4 billion. By April 2024, Ramp was at $7.65 billion while Brex was cutting staff.

Then Ramp pulled away. Its valuation went from $13 billion in March 2025 to $32 billion in November 2025, and it passed $1 billion in annualized revenue in October 2025, according to TechCrunch.

As of October 15, 2026, Ramp is valued at $60 billion after a $1.85 billion round, and says it has passed $2 billion in annualized revenue with 85,000 customers, TechCrunch reported.

That makes Ramp's latest private valuation more than 11 times Brex's sale price. Brex's case now rests on different strengths: its own global card infrastructure and a large bank's balance sheet and brand behind it.

What Brex did differently

It solved a problem its founders could see

Founders could not get a corporate card. Brex's founders were inside the startup world, so they had both the insight and the first buyers.

It built the hard infrastructure itself

Owning the stack down to the card rails took years, but it let Brex issue local cards in many countries and became the main reason a bank bought it.

It chose focus over volume, twice

Brex dropped tens of thousands of small businesses in 2022, then cut staff, management layers and its co-CEO model in 2024. Both moves hurt, and both came before growth returned.

It followed its customers upmarket

Startups that joined early grew into global companies. Brex built for them, then sold the same product to enterprises and non-tech companies.

It borrowed distribution

Embedded put Brex cards inside Coupa and Sabre. Capital One now adds a brand, a marketing budget and a large customer base.

What could slow Brex down?

The first risk is integration. Capital One's Q2 2026 call made clear that fully using its marketing machine requires new data pipelines and model calibration, and that bringing its travel portal to Brex will wait until other work is done.

The second is talent. COO Camilla Matias, who joined in 2018, stepped down in May 2026, a month after the deal closed. Capital One has budgeted to keep people: its Q4 2025 earnings presentation estimates about $950 million in deal, integration and retention costs over 3 years.

The third is Ramp. A rival with a $60 billion valuation, $2 billion in annualized revenue and about $5 billion raised, as TechCrunch reported, can spend heavily on product and sales. Rippling is also pushing into corporate cards, expense management and bill pay.

The fourth is the business model. Most of Brex's revenue has come from interchange, which rises and falls with how much customers spend. When startups cut spending in 2023, Brex's growth slowed with them, TechCrunch reported.

The last is that outsiders now see less. Capital One's finance chief said on the Q2 2026 call that it does not intend to break out Brex's results, so the market will have little hard data on whether the acquisition is working.

Borrowing Brex's founder-network start

Brex's first customers came from the startup community its founders were already part of, and referrals from existing customers stayed one of its ways to qualify new startups. Okara's Reddit Agent finds high-intent threads where your buyers are already asking for help and drafts replies you post yourself. The LinkedIn Agent drafts posts that keep you visible to the founders and operators you want to reach.

Frequently asked questions

What is Brex's valuation?

Brex's latest valuation is $5.15 billion, the price Capital One agreed to pay in January 2026. At closing in April 2026, Capital One valued the cash and stock it paid at about $4.5 billion, since about half the price was paid in its shares. Brex's peak private valuation was $12.3 billion in January 2022.

Who owns Brex now?

Capital One owns Brex. The acquisition closed on April 7, 2026. Brex keeps its brand, and co-founder Pedro Franceschi continues as CEO, reporting to Capital One executive Frank LaPrade.

How much revenue does Brex make?

Franceschi said in September 2025 that Brex had reached $700 million in gross annualized revenue, growing 50%. In January 2026, a Brex spokesperson said the business was growing 40% and was profitable. Capital One does not disclose Brex's revenue separately, so there is no confirmed 2026 figure.

How much funding did Brex raise?

Brex said it had raised $1.2 billion from investors by January 2022. Including secondary sales, TechCrunch put the total at over $1.5 billion, and Crunchbase News counted $1.7 billion in equity and debt. Its largest round was a $425 million Series D led by Tiger Global in April 2021.

Who founded Brex?

Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi founded Brex in 2017 after leaving Stanford and going through Y Combinator. The two Brazilians had previously built the payments company Pagar.me as teenagers. They ran Brex as co-CEOs until June 2024, when Franceschi became sole CEO and Dubugras became board chair.

Why did Brex stop serving small businesses?

In June 2022, Brex said it could not serve traditional small businesses and fast-growing startups well at the same time. It closed accounts for "tens of thousands" of businesses without professional funding or scale. Dubugras later said revenue fell less than 2%, but the company took "a huge reputation hit."

How many customers does Brex have?

Brex told TechCrunch it had more than 30,000 customers in June 2024. The January 2026 deal announcement said over 25,000 companies run on Brex, and Franceschi wrote that it serves 1 in 3 US startups and more than 300 public companies. Customers include Anthropic, DoorDash, Robinhood, Zoom and Intel.

Is Brex bigger than Ramp?

No. As of October 2026, Ramp is valued at $60 billion and says it has more than $2 billion in annualized revenue and 85,000 customers. Brex sold for $5.15 billion and last reported $700 million in gross annualized revenue in 2025.