The Start:

Brex was founded by two Brazilians from Rio - Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi. Together, in their teens, they launched and sold a fintech company called Pagar. They then moved to SF and applied to YCombinator.

The Problem:

At YC, Michael Siebel asked the founders - if you could build anything, what would you build? The founders replied - A business bank.

The problem was something they faced first hand. Despite receiving investment, startups struggled to get a corporate credit card.

Traditional banks were slow, manual, with archaic digital interfaces. Worst of all, they didn’t know how to underwrite early-stage businesses with no credit history.

The First Version:

The founders, Henrique & Pedro scoped out their MVP to a single sentence - build a corporate credit card for startups. They focused on features like fast sign up, higher limits without personal guarantees, and automated receipt capture.

Getting their first customers:

The founders focused on friends and family who were either founders or finance people at small companies.

Since they graduated from YC, they also got a bunch of early customers from the YC community.

They also scraped LinkedIn for contacts of thousands of foreign founders (who typically lack FICO scores and struggle to get credit cards) & emailed them if they would be interested in the product. They had 100 pilot customers doing this.

They iterated based on feedback from these users & Brex delivered its first cards to the pilot customers in four months.

One of the things Henrique did to raise funds was to keep meeting & building relationships with VCs.

They updated them on developments and were always kept in the loop. They didnt stop or start any stage. It was a continuous process.

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