Pangea uses Brex to make every dollar count and saves $75K a year.
Company: Pangea brings top talent to businesses.
Pangea.app is a marketplace for contract-to-hire marketing and design talent. Founded in 2016, the startup uses AI to connect companies with marketing and design talent in seconds. Pangea was part of the Y Combinator Class of 2021 and employs five people remotely.
Challenges: Pangea was losing money to banking fees and ghost charges.
Pangea began as a freelance college talent marketplace but pivoted to connect organizations with marketing and design professionals. That pivot yielded some early success, and Pangea co-founder Adam Alpert saw a path forward without having to raise money in a tough venture capital environment. Alpert shifted focus to lean profitability and zero-based accounting methodologies to make every dollar count.
However, its banking partner wasn’t helping that strategy. According to Adam, JP Morgan Chase started charging $300 a month, and their lack of automatic allocation led to considerable overdraft fees and cash flow headaches.
Adam had a pretty good idea of what he needed — and wasn’t getting — from his current bank: “I wanted to keep a certain amount in our checking account every week for payroll or expenses or whatever. Everything else should be either in a sweep account or a treasury. But our bank didn’t have that. I could only set up recurring fixed-amount transfers, but sometimes things would get out of whack and our accounts would get overdrawn. It was a nightmare.”
Further hindering Pangea’s financial strategy was a lack of visibility into company spend. “Employees would put subscriptions on my company card, and if that person left, we’d keep getting charged,” he said. “We only got visibility into those ghost charges in QuickBooks at the end of the month.”
“We only got visibility into those ghost charges in QuickBooks at the end of the month.”
— Adam Alpert, Co-founder, Pangea
Solution: Pangea consolidates its financial stack with Brex.
As a co-founder of Pangea, Adam sought an integrated banking, treasury, and corporate card solution to extract the most value out of every dollar Pangea had.
“As we strive for lean profitability, every expense matters. I want to know every single thing we’re spending money on — I don’t care if it’s $10 or $100 — and Brex makes it easy to do that."
— Adam Alpert, Co-founder, Pangea
Adam chose to consolidate Pangea’s financial stack on the Brex platform, and he got his wish for flexible checking and treasury services in one operating account.“For us, we focus on consolidating as opposed to introducing new tools. So we brought all of our checking and money market accounts over to a Brex business account. It's a lot easier for me to keep everything in one place."
Pangea also uses Brex’s corporate card for expenses and leverages the integrated spend management capabilities to automatically track, control, and reconcile transactions. The Brex partnership also led the startup to Inkle, an accounting partner that helps Pangea close the books and file its taxes.
Impact: Increased visibility saves $75K+ a year and helps unleash ‘founder mode.’
The Brex business account wiped the $300 monthly banking fee from Pangea’s books, and Brex’s automatic allocation between checking, treasury, and vault accounts gave Pangea more flexibility in using its cash — for expenses as well as to earn additional money.
“Other banking products required $500,000 minimums to access money market and yield accounts. Brex’s banking product is very competitive on its own, but not requiring a minimum balance to earn yield was incredibly appealing.”
— Adam Alpert, Co-founder, Pangea
In addition, Brex's virtual card was instrumental in enabling Pangea to proactively control spend and eliminate recurring ghost charges. “With Brex, we can give each employee a unique card number and issue specific spend limits with built-in controls,” Adam said. “Spending is tracked to the right card for accountability, and we can set automatic expirations or close cards in a single click. It’s especially useful as headcount goes up or down.”
With all company spending now managed in Brex, Adam got the full visibility into Pangea’s spend that he was looking for, which helped further trim costs. “Bringing all our money to Brex was super simple, and it’s helped us identify other things we were spending on. Since moving to Brex, we’ve identified $6,000 in monthly spend that we were able to unwind.”
Adam added that the Brex relationship continues to pay off in so many other ways: “Because of Brex, I’ve been able to consolidate a lot of our financial stack. And I was able to find an accounting partner (Inkle) who is literally saving us 90% on our year-end tax filing.
“The entire Brex platform brings us so much value, and it’s easier to manage the day-to-day. Brex helps me stay in founder mode, so we can continue to build without constantly worrying about our finances.”