PayPal Founders Back Brex’s Corporate Card For Startups

PayPal Founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin have participated in a funding round for Brex, a startup that designed a commercial card for startups.

An announcement Tuesday (June 19) said Brex raised $57 million for its solution. The Series B funding was led by Y Combinator Continuity, Thiel and Levchin, investor Yuri Milner, VC Ribbit Capital and former Visa CEO Carl Pascarella.

According to its press release, Brex wants to enable startups to access credit card products. These businesses are often limited in their choice of cards due to financial and regulatory hurdles, the company said. Brex offers a card product that does not require a personal guarantee.

“Startups that have raised millions and are poised for hyper-growth can’t get slowed down hassling with banks requiring personal guarantees and offering meager credit limits,” said Brex Co-founder and CEO Henrique Dubugras in a statement. “Traditional credit models look at how much a company can pay back in a year based on profits, often disqualifying startups. We rebuilt the financial services tech stack from the ground up and created a new kind of card to specifically meet the needs of startups.”

The card integrates with expense management software, also offered by Brex, that supports automated data capture of receipts emailed to the platform.

Anu Hariharan, Y Combinator Continuity partner, said in a statement, “Brex is redefining the corporate card experience for startups of all stages. This has been a long-standing pain point for many of our founders.”

Dalton Caldwell, another Y Combinator partner, added, “As a startup founder, you have so many things going on, and the last thing you want to worry about is finding a quick and easy payments solution for company expenses, let alone personally guaranteeing a card or trying to find an expense management system that works.”