How Brex is doing, 10 months into founder mode.

A recap of our progress in 2024

Ten months ago, we rolled out Brex 3.0, a new operating model to increase the intensity and quality of our execution. As we approach the end of the year, now is a good time to recap the progress made thus far.

At Brex, we reimagine financial services and software to help companies make every dollar of spend count, across corporate cards, banking, bill pay, expense management, and travel. We serve customers of all sizes, from startups to the largest companies on the planet.

While the work is far from done, 2024 was a year of sharp improvement at Brex. Revenue growth accelerated almost 3x this year, net revenue retention is up more than 15 points, while burn rate is down almost 70%. In 2025, we expect the pace of revenue growth to continue accelerating at scale, and to be the last year in which Brex burns money.

Growth acceleration and enterprise momentum

In 2024, we simplified how we sell, removing two layers of management in sales, bringing leaders closer to every deal, and putting a lot more rigor into salesmanship and craft.

As a result, customer acquisition accelerated 50%, while sales efficiency and CAC paybacks improved by 40%, with the vast majority of our sales team meeting or exceeding quota. On the startup segment, we accelerated customer acquisition by 50% in Q3 vs. a year ago, with more and more companies starting and running their entire businesses on Brex. On the mid-market segment, we also materially scaled the number of customers acquired, while more than doubling deal sizes and improving paybacks and win rates in this segment to >65%.

One of the highlights of 2024 was our enterprise business, growing 91% this year, and net revenue retention of >130%, while also increasing the pace of customer acquisition by 50% compared to a year ago. Brex’s unique global financial infrastructure is the only solution that can reliably support companies with global operations, offering locally issued cards, local settlement, and local reimbursements across 50+ countries. We’re proud to serve some of the largest and most important organizations on the planet, including:

• Companies at the forefront of AI, including Anthropic, two enterprise AI companies with market cap over >$100B, one of the largest frontier model companies, Scale AI, Applied Intuition, and fast-growing AI startups like Mercor and HeyGen.
• Our first company with a market cap of >$1T.
• Large consumer companies like DoorDash.
• One of the largest CPG companies on the planet, and non-software enterprise companies like Five Guys, Warby Parker, and Sonos.
• Fintechs such as Coinbase, Robinhood, and Plaid.
• Large software companies like Wiz and ZoomInfo, and several enterprise software companies >$50B.
• Over 150 public companies that run on Brex today.

In total, our enterprise customers have an estimated market cap of >$2.9 trillion dollars, whereas three years ago, all Brex customers combined wouldn’t reach $200b in market cap. As growth accelerates across all segments, Brex is now the only player that can credibly serve companies at every stage of growth, from YC founders starting out to public companies with trillions of dollars of market cap and tens of thousands of employees worldwide.

Raising the bar for how we build product

A big change for Brex 3.0 was One Roadmap, i.e. replacing team-level planning with a single roadmap for the entire company, where I’m the ultimate editor of what ships. This forces me to choose what truly matters, allowing us to make a large, company-affecting investment in the few things that are step-function changes to customers, and drop everything else. We executed three major releases in 2024:

• Winter 2024 introduced a new Brex bill pay, and expense flagging powered by AI to automatically detect out-of-policy spend on receipts.
• Summer 2024 introduced AI-powered accounting with continuous close, a card control center to manage cards at scale, and a blazing-fast new UI with 100+ improvements.
• Fall 2024 launched a new Impact Dashboard that helps you control spend, save time, and earn more money, with benchmarks against peers, as well as AI-based search and global bill pay.

We also launched four major products outside of our typical release process:

• Banking, a supercharged banking experience for startups with Stripe Atlas, giving customers full control over how they store, earn yield, and move their money globally.
• Embedded, a new way for software platforms (such as Coupa) to embed Brex cards into their products to unlock global payments and deeply integrated payment workflows.
• BrexPay for Navan, a product partnership with Navan to achieve the state-of-the-art for enterprise corporate travel and payments, with 100% automated travel payment reconciliation and local currency cards and no FX markups in 50+ countries.
• Brex for Accounting Firms, a new program to help accounting firms take full advantage of the Brex platform to optimize their own workflows, empower their clients, and expand their practice.

Three releases and four product launches later, the benefits of One Roadmap are clear. Because we now build fewer things in any given release, I can afford to spend so much more time designing each product surface and sweating the details — which is the only way to build high-quality software. As a result, NPS improved 11 points over the past 10 months.

People and culture

In 2024, Brex went through the largest leadership change in the company’s history. My cultural goal for Brex 3.0 was to change the archetype of Brex leaders to be: builders that operate at all levels. We eliminated the role of people managers and org builders, taking two entire layers of management out, and putting the actual experts in charge. Leaders are now reconnected to their craft, and working in service of a single goal: building something excellent. For Brex 3.0, I wanted to build a company that I’d be proud and excited to come work at every day — this is it for me.

We made a lot of people bets, and virtually all of them have paid off. We promoted from within across Engineering, Design, Finance, Operations, and Legal, and brought new leaders in Sales and People. As I watched leaders rise to the occasion and raise the bar for quality and craftsmanship this year, it reminded me of the most rewarding parts of the job: seeing talented people achieving things they never thought they could, and taking part in a journey that transforms both them and the company for the better.

Looking ahead into 2025

In 2025, we will continue to compound the momentum built this year, growing faster than 2024 and being the last year in which we burn money — an important milestone to our future IPO. We will also continue to raise the bar on product quality and innovation, while increasing the pace of customer acquisition with healthy unit economics at scale.

While the goals for next year are even more ambitious than 2024, we now have far more confidence in our 2025 plans vs. 2024. Instead of building momentum from scratch, which is what we had to do this year to get Brex 3.0 off the ground, we’re now compounding what’s working — with the right team, product investments, and customers for the long-term.

Final thoughts

Brex 3.0 brought a lot of change, but perhaps the biggest change of all is expecting nothing to ever come easy. During the first 6 years of Brex, things just “happened.” We pioneered the category, and had instant product-market fit — scaling from 0 to $100MM ARR in 16 months, despite mistakes on the product, GTM, and hiring. This stopped being true in 2023, and it required a painful reset to bring our culture back into what it once was: a culture of builders, willing to go extra hard to serve customers and build a generational company over the next decade.

Many years ago, I asked Paul Graham what the job of a founder was once the company hit some scale. He told me the job was “to figure out how to be happy.” The answer puzzled me for many years, and then it all made sense. If you’re unhappy in the journey, you’d just stop. When I started thinking about making these changes a year ago, a burst of excitement and energy ran through my body, as I thought how much better the company would be in 1, 2, 3 years — but even before getting there, how much more energizing the journey would be to get there.

While the work is far from done a year later, 2024 taught me that taking the hard path, and running your company in a way that’s truly authentic to you, is worth the risk. After all, the biggest risk of all is not gaining energy from the process itself — the only reliable source of energy to compound a business for decades to come.

I hope this inspires other founders and companies to make the changes they need to realize their full potential.

Pedro