Brex co-founders Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras.
Brex
Capital One mentioned Thursday that it was buying funds startup Brex for $5.15 billion, the newest splashy deal undertaken by the financial institution’s CEO, Richard Fairbank.
The agency, which disclosed the deal in its fourth-quarter earnings assertion, mentioned the deal is made up of fifty% money and 50% inventory. Brex was beforehand valued at $12.3 billion.
Shares of the financial institution fell about 3%.
Beneath Fairbank, a uncommon founder-CEO of a serious U.S. financial institution, Capital One acquired rival card agency Uncover Monetary final yr for about $35 billion. That deal was Fairbank’s crowning achievement, giving the bank card lender entry to one of many solely cost networks of any scale.
“Since our founding, we got down to construct a funds firm on the frontier of the know-how revolution,” Fairbank mentioned in a launch. “Buying Brex accelerates this journey, particularly within the enterprise funds market.”
Fairbank mentioned that Brex pioneered the mixture of company playing cards, banking and spend administration software program: “They’ve taken the rarest of journeys for a fintech, constructing a vertically built-in platform from the underside of the tech stack to the highest,” he mentioned.
Nonetheless, the greater than 50% decline in valuation for Brex from its 2023 stage reveals the headwinds that even profitable fintech firms have encountered.
Brex is amongst a category of fintech companies that rose to prominence throughout a interval of low rates of interest; it was identified initially as a startup that made loans to different startups through its playing cards.
However the firm expanded past know-how into different sectors and now companies bigger established companies and startups alike, together with Robinhood, Zoom and Anthropic.
Capital One, which has provided enterprise bank cards for many years, grew to become more and more satisfied that it was Brex’s mannequin that may be the profitable providing, in line with an individual with data of the lender’s technique.
“We did not need to pursue this acquisition, our development was extremely sturdy,” Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi informed CNBC in an interview.
Combining Brex’s know-how with Capital One’s attain and sources would develop the startup’s scale sooner than as a standalone agency, he mentioned.
