Disruptor 50 #4: Brex Co-CEO talks using AI to streamline company finances

CNBC releasing its annual Disruptor 50 list this week. Coming in at number 4 is Brex. The fintech company uses AI to help companies streamline expense reporting, booking management capabilities, and more. And joining us now is Brex co-CEO Pedro Franceschi. Pedro, good to have you. So I'm noticing this expansion from so many small business and enterprise-focused fintechs in the breadth of things that you're trying to offer. Tell me about how you're doing that to serve the demand you're seeing for customers.

First, thanks for having me. Very happy to be here and very happy to be making the list as number 4. So for Brex, we started the company in 2017 with corporate cards. But what we saw is as you start to have spend and your company start growing, a lot of the challenge becomes how do you manage the spend at scale? And a lot of what the company evolved into and what we do today is help companies make every dollar count. How do they make every dollar across their spend on corporate cards, on invoicing, on bill pay, on travel, do count, and then do this on a global scale as well. So, and obviously we're using a lot of AI for helping customers automate this, but really for us is how to help every dollar spent go farther for our customers.

And the spend management to be able to look at whether companies are paying the right amount, a fair amount for things that they're acquiring, not just on a T&E, travel and entertainment basis, but just for things like equipment. How is that working?

Yeah. So for us, the way we think about it is every single dollar spent in a company, typically, especially as you start growing, SAP Finance teams, they start to think about, is this in policy? Is this on budget? And not just a few dollars are spent, but every dollar spent. And a lot of what our product does is enable our customers for doing this in a really large scale. So we have, you know, for example, 100 public companies using Brex today to doing this for their whole employee base and every single financial decision. And a lot of the value that they get as they start using the platform is the level of automation that we provide as well for them. So we just crossed the mark this week of helping our customers automate 11 million hours of manual work that they were typically doing manually across accounting, collecting receipts, you know, chasing folks for memos. And all of that goes away as our customers start using Brex and leverage the platform capabilities and AI to automate a lot of that busy work for them.

For the folks that maybe weren't aware of Brex before last March when we saw the collapse of SVB and we saw many different startup and other types of, you know, companies have to sort of reimagine what their financial transactions were going to look like. You extended lines of credit. You brought on many new customers through that process. Now that we're 14 months past that, what, what was, I guess, the impact of that and how did it spur you to perhaps think even more broadly about the business and how you're now building out the portfolio?

Yeah. So, so the time around the SVB collapse was, was a very interesting time for our company. So we took over 4,000 customers and, you know, over $2 billion deposits in a little bit over 48 hours. At the same time of all that, we established this billion-dollar emergency fund line for a lot of the customers that couldn't access their funds in SVB. And the roots of Brex is in serving startups. Today, one in every three startups in the US uses us. And when such an iconic player in the space collapsed, it was— we felt it was our duty to extend our customers and help them really, you know, weather that, that complicated time. And, you know, now 14 months later, we're really proud that, you know, more than 90% of the customers who came to Brex are still Brex customers and expanding their usage of the platform, which has been really good to see.