(Bloomberg) — Brex, the startup known for its corporate credit cards, is rolling out a new platform to help businesses manage spending as the company branches into financial software.
The company’s new platform, Brex Empower, will help the company build out more products in the future, Brex said in a statement Wednesday. The first product on the platform, a spending-management program, has signed DoorDash Inc. as a customer.
The new software platform will help deepen Brex’s relationships with the startups and other businesses that have come to use its card for corporate expenses. San Francisco-based Brex, valued at $12.3 billion in a funding round earlier this year, started creating the platform last summer and is now doing an early-access setup for customers, with a plan to roll it out more broadly by this summer, co-Chief Executive Officer Henrique Dubugras said.
“Brex, in this next step for us, has a way to bridge companies from that culture of command and control — of everything needs to be reviewed, everything needs to be approved — to this culture of trust and empowerment in which companies can move a lot faster by trusting and empowering their employees,” Dubugras said. “With this platform, we’re focusing on how do we both increase the speed, reduce the friction for employees and decrease spend — triple win for the company.”
Brex’s expansion has fueled an increase in hiring, with the company’s workforce growing to around 1,100 today from roughly 600 people at the beginning of 2021. Dubugras said he expects to end the year with almost 1,700 employees, with a “good part” of the hires going toward the new platform.
Earlier this year, the company announced the hiring of Karandeep Anand from Meta Platforms Inc. as its chief product officer. The startup also raised $300 million in a funding round led by Greenoaks Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures.
“I want to be a public company eventually,” Dubugras said. “Even though Brex has a big valuation, we’re a quite young company. So we still need to mature more to be ready for the public markets.”
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