Scale AI saves 30 hours a month with Brex.

Company

Scale AI is a fast-growing company on a mission to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence. They’ve built a data-centric solution for managing the entire machine learning lifecycle, and it’s used by leaders like Toyota, Instacart, PayPal, and Flexport.

Scale AI was founded in 2016 and graduated from Y Combinator’s Summer batch that year — since then it has grown to over 700 employees across the country and globally.

Challenge

Starting with a team of four and a big dream to revolutionize AI, Scale AI wanted a one-stop shop for banking, corporate cards, and spend management that would help them grow their startup quickly and sustainably.

They also wanted a future-proof solution that would scale with them and suit their goals at every stage of growth, helping them innovate quickly and cost-effectively no matter how big their team got — or how many international markets they expanded into.

Solution

Scale initially chose Brex for a startup-friendly corporate card with no personal guarantee. With access to capital and a five-star mobile app to manage tasks, cards, payments, and expenses from anywhere, Scale was able to spend and grow fast.

However, as Scale grew, they were concerned about slowing down the pace of business. “As we grew, we wanted to be able to enable employees to move fast and make decisions and not be blocked by chains of approval that take a long time,” says Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI.

To ensure speed while boosting control and accountability, Scale upgraded to Brex’s advanced features to set spend limits for specific types of spend and keep every team compliant automatically.

“What I love about Brex is that they recognize that companies get too bureaucratic as they get bigger and can’t do their best work. They really solved that” says Alexandr. “The platform’s trust and verify model allows everyone to move quickly, while giving the org the control it needs.”

Scale AI’s latest stage of growth involves scaling into new global geographies. “We’ve been growing a lot internationally. Brex has really been an enabler because it’s a global platform that delivers global card acceptance,” says Alexandr.

Impact

“We’ve been with Brex since our early startup days. They’ve helped us grow, and have grown with us,” says Alexandr. And, with advanced features from Brex, Scale AI now has an end-to-end solution for global spending that drives speed and compliance.

“With Brex’s AI-powered platform, our employees and managers are saving 30 hours per month on manual expense management,” Alexandr says. “ Brex automatically generates receipts and reminds employees whenever there’s something missing, reducing expense busywork org-wide and increasing our compliance.”

Scale’s finance team and managers use the platform’s budgets to enable employees to spend responsibly across all global entities. They pre-approve spending for specific purposes, trust that employees are empowered to do the right thing, and manage by exception with spend alerts for any out-of-policy or suspicious spend.

“We started with just the card, and then we went to card and light budgeting. Now we are using spend limits with flags for certain levels or kinds of spend,” says Alexandr. “Brex’s accounting automations are saving the finance team 20 hours per month and enabling us to close the books five days faster.”