Brex

Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi founded Brex is 2017, but that’s not when their friendship and entrepreneurial journeys began. In 2012, Henrique and Pedro were both high school seniors living in Brazil (Henrique was in Sao Paulo and Pedro was in Rio de Janeiro). They were both interested in coding and software development, and met on Twitter when they got into a heated exchange about the nuances of coding tools. Twitter’s character limit didn’t allow them to go into too much depth about our respective arguments, so Henrique and Pedro decided to hop on Skype to discuss there instead. They instantly became friends. About a year later in 2013, Henrique and Pedro worked together to launch their first company, Pagar.me. Pagar.me was a startup that allowed Brazilian merchants to accept online payments, similar to what Stripe is now focused on. Three years later, Henrique and Pedro sold Pagar.me to Stone, a Brazil-based payments fintech company. This moment led them to the next part of our entrepreneurial journey, where they both decided to come to the U.S. after applying and being accepted into Stanford. Their time at Stanford didn’t last long though —Henrique and Pedro dropped out eight months later after they received funding from Y Combinator to start a VR company. They quickly learned, however, that they didn’t actually know much about the VR world and had a real passion for tech investing.As entrepreneurs themselves, Henrique and Pedro realized how difficult it was for founders to receive enough funding to launch their businesses. They initially wanted to build bank accounts for U.S.-based startups, but pivoted to creating a corporate credit card. Today, Brex has tens of thousands of customers including notable companies like DoorDash, Coinbase, Scale AI, Indeed and more. Today Brex offers a whole range of services like expense management, business accounts, bill pay, financial modeling, travel, and more.

Brex has loved the ongoing collaboration with YC, including partnering together to host supper club dinners, founder mixers, happy hours and end of batch parties. Brex has continued to lean into the YC community via a billboard program whereby Brex+YC celebrate graduating classes by promoting their companies on prominent billboard placements.