hdubugras

Brex | Engineer - Frontend/Full Stack/Backend/Infra | Onsite | Full-Time | SF, NYC, Vancouver

Brex is building the next generation of B2B financial services with better tech and without the restrictions of outdated legacy banking technology, starting with corporate cards for startups. We’re looking for engineers across all roles who want to be part of a team that believes that taking the time to make a thorough decision matters, where pride in our craft is a defining characteristic, and who are optimistic about accelerating a bright future of financial services for our customers.

Tech stack: Our system is powered by dozens of microservices written in Elixir, Typescript, Python and Golang all built and deployed on-top of AWS and Kubernetes.

Learn More: https://www.themuse.com/profiles/brex

See all jobs: https://careers.brex.com/

Thanks for the questions! To your first point, there's definitely some potential interaction between our customers. We're not quite sure what that will look like right now, but we do have our eyes on that in the future. We offer discounts on goods and services through our rewards portal so there's always the possibility of getting customers involved with that.

We're actually partnered with CLSA! You can read more about that here (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/brex-launches-first-corporate...) and if you're a CLSA member you'll start to see some communication about our partnership in the coming days/weeks.

Helping you comply with SBIR-type grants is definitely something we're researching. We actually already have some expense management tools (such as our receipt capture/handling) that make it easier to comply and will continue to work to make them better.

We handle fraud in-house through a joint effort of a variety of teams (customer experience, operations, engineering, etc.) and even have a webpage dedicated to it https://brex.com/fraud/ :)

Thanks for the feedback and totally understand where you're coming from. We're working on adding these security measures in the near term. We care a lot about security too - one of the reasons we started Brex and made virtual cards a feature is that it is a much more secure payments tool. We started on the acquiring side where fraud is a huge issue and we're looking forward to adding more security features shortly.

We leverage merchant level data that's provided by the networks as an input into our auto categorization system, which uses Google Places API and some simple machine learning. We then overlay randomly sampled manual inspections to ensure quality

Great question!

1.) 7x on rideshare is a lot but if you think about the portfolio of spend for a company, most of it is not on rideshare. Since our offering is superior, people usually put all of their spend on Brex, which helps us make up for the amount of money we're giving away on ride share. We also get back discounts from vendors. In general though, we believe in providing the most value to customers, so we're ok with giving away more rewards than the other corporate cards out there.

2.) The personal credit card space is interesting, but our mission for now is to accelerate entrepreneurs, which means we're focusing on building the best possible financial products for businesses. The market for this is huge, so we still have a long ways to go

Hey, thanks for reading. Yes we should have been more clear that generalizing our data implies that "61% of startups use Copper", but as we don't have universal coverage across every company (yet) we'll have some missing information.

As for Intercom, that's interesting we use it mostly for support chat.

Exactly.

Sure, it might be interesting to compare rounds this way, on how long each round is planned to last.

Thanks, we'll make that clearer in our next iteration.

We can definitely add a runway / months to exhaustion to our next analysis.

Obviously belongs on every real HN thread

Great data here, thanks! Yes, part of the difficulty of this analysis is the low number of graduates makes it hard to see what's causal.

Thanks! Burn rate is inclusive of payroll, yes. Everything that eventually hits the bank account will be included in the burn rate.

Yes, all worthwhile normalizations!

Agreed that from a data perspective, it would be fascinating to see how an investment regime shift would change these benchmark indicators, which should also be useful to startups.

But startups don't just raise money because they need it, they also have to be given it. That said, there is a question of what parts of this are causal that we plan to tease apart in future analyses.

Right, we would define what you're pointing to as a subset of cash flow - you are specifically highlighting "liquidity" when you talk about the lag there, but I agree we could have been more clear. 82% is referring to failure for financial reasons vs. management, regulatory, etc.

Exactly. Our plan going forward is to start breaking down burn by major factors like salary, rent, vendor spend.

Another interesting one we're looking at is the breakdown of burn by industry and stage. We can also then compare the major factors across these breakdowns to give really good comparisons for startups.

Hey HN -

Henrique here co-founder of Brex (YC W’17). I wanted to introduce the HN community to some new data we gathered at Brex as part of our new blog.

We specifically looked to highlight data that is not available to other startups.

+ We focused on startup cash burn rates by funding stage (pre-seed, seed, Series A, etc.) because for many startups there is always this question about how much you should be burning.

+ Separately, we looked at some of the most popular vendors for startups on Brex in categories like cloud services, CRM, rideshare etc.

+ We analyzed the size of the "stealth" startup market. For Brex, it was hard being in stealth for over a year and it's helpful to know just how many of you are out there

+ We looked at regional trends in startup cash burn to help startups adjust their benchmarking for their locations

Note, we were careful to aggregate the data and only share things we thought could actually help startup founders and early employees

Let me know your feedback!

Henrique

Hey! Indeed we do have very good traction. But the fact that you can get business credit with zero assets or revenue is true if you're wiling to personally guarantee the card, because then it's just like getting a personal card but with your business name on it. I as an immigrant without a lot of personal credit history was unable to get a card when starting Brex. Today, we raised over $57m and we're still unable to get cards from banks. We're the first card to actually underwrite startups and give them a card with high limits and no personal guarantee.

We bought it together with the press launch, which was last Tuesday :)

Not yet unfortunately

Yes - for the first year

So the deal here is: you give us your bank credentials and we won’t require any kind of personal guarantee. Other cards wont get your bank data but will require you to personal guarantee. Fincity is used by intuit/quickbooks, that’s why we chose them.

About aws rewards - noted! Will improve clarity

We tried - finicity serves intuit so it works better for business/corporate accounts. Plaid is better for consumers.

We sold the company - so up to the new management!

Oh and if you mean the secured credit card - we can give higher limits without having to set up a security deposit and tie up your cash

1 - you don’t have to worry about prefunding the card, just spend!

2 - you have 30 day float, so more time to pay the statement

Yep!