pedrofranceschi

Brex founder here. Let me provide more context on what happened, and how this actually allows us to serve startups better.

In 2018, we launched Brex and started serving the fastest growing companies out there (DoorDash, Airtable, ScaleAI, Flexport, etc). As we expanded in 2020, we decided to start serving small businesses. We onboarded tens of thousands of traditional brick-and-mortar companies to Brex, along with startups. Over time, we realized that our startup customers were growing very fast, and needed BrexHQ to scale with them, but Brex didn’t work as well for larger companies.

Last year, we decided to go back to our core, and shift our resources to make sure startups could scale with Brex. However, we still had tens of thousands of small businesses with very different needs from fast-growing companies. By spreading ourselves too thin, we couldn’t serve either small businesses or startups well:

1) Small businesses didn’t get the products they needed (e.g. working capital solutions). 2) We had to degrade the white-glove level of service we offered to startups, in order to scale to tens of thousands of customers.

As we continued to scale Brex to serve startups (such as 70% of YC companies!), we realized we couldn’t do a great job serving small businesses at the same time. This led us to the painful decision to stop serving traditional small businesses. We decided to draw the line of who’s eligible as any customer who received any investment (accelerator, angel, VC, web3 token, etc).

This has been an incredibly difficult decision for the team, but it allows us to deeply focus on serving startups better. I wish we had been more transparent with the startup community about what this means to them – apologies for all the confusion.

If you believe we made a mistake offboarding you, please let us know at [email protected]

Brex founder here.

We've made the difficult decision to no longer offer services to the small business market.

Back in April we launched Empower, and we decided to put the full weight of Brex towards building the best global payments platform for tech startups and larger companies. With that, we realized we couldn't do a great job serving the small business community at the same time. This has been an incredibly difficult decision for me and the team, but we believe small businesses deserve a partner that is entirely focused on them.

We know how changes in financial services can be disruptive – especially in a moment like now. We're doing all we can, and working with other financial service providers to make this transition as smooth as possible.

[Brex co-founder]

We’re incredibly excited to announce Brex Cash!

Since we started Brex, my co-founder Henrique and I had much bigger plans than only corporate credit cards. Business bank accounts are a pain for virtually every company for a long time, and for the last 18 months we embarked on a journey to build a banking experience that, coupled with the Brex credit card, is 10x better than anything out there.

Alan Kay used to say that if you’re serious about software, you should make your own hardware. In fintech, I believe the equivalent analogy is: if you’re serious about financial services, you should build your own infrastructure. At Brex, we have a strong belief that great financial products innovate at the core, and not only at the UI layer. So instead of relying on existing banking systems to build Brex Cash, we took the approach of building our core systems from scratch, building directly on top of the payment rails (NACHA and FedWire). This level of autonomy with the technology stack enables us to do amazing things like instant onboarding, making funds available instantly, charging no fees on wires/ACH (given our more efficient cost structure), and deeply integrating with the Brex card. And at the UI layer, we packed all of this into a user experience that is minimal, polished and designed to save companies time and get them back to running their business.

We also wanted to make business banking better in all aspects - not only on software. We noticed our customers raised millions of dollars and kept the money parked in their checking accounts, earning no interest. A 10x better experience meant offering the highest yield on their money and, to achieve that, Brex Cash became not only a complex technical challenge, but also a financial/regulatory one. The way most fintechs offer banking services without having to be regulated as banks is by “reselling” another bank’s products and bolting a UI on top of the bank’s checking/savings account. But because traditional banks separate checking and savings accounts, customers earn a lower yield on their money as a whole. Instead, we chose a different structure: customers put their cash into Brex Treasury LLC, a registered broker-dealer affiliate of Brex Inc., that invests the cash in low-risk securities, such as U.S. Treasuries.

The reactions of our early Brex Cash customers have been overwhelmingly positive, and we believe we’re on the path to build the best bank account replacement, not only for startups but for any business in America. Personally, I’ve been dreaming about this product since I was 16 years old building my first company in Brazil, and I’m incredibly proud of the Brex team for their hard work to make this dream a reality :)

We’d love to hear your feedback!

It's something we thought a lot about as we had to pick the categories most important to our customers. What we heard is that dining and travel were more important since they are so commonly offered by other cards that people didnt want to feel like they were "missing out" by using Brex. Most of the feedback was that people like using Brex and all of the features and tech - and rewards was a way for the customer to make sure they were gaining something using Brex - and we do offer points on ad spend. Also, one cool feature where we help with ads is we actually clean the vendor, so rather than seeing GoogleAds or Facebook Ads followed by a bunch of numbers - with Brex you get one clean merchant name and that helps the user aggregate all spend by vendor - a lot of users love this feature

Thanks! :)

Pedro from Brex here :) Thanks for the feedback, super helpful! 1. We will make sure to support international addresses for the individuals, thanks! 2. On the submit button, did you sign-up from mobile/tablet by any chance?

same

No. Teleport installs triggers on all tables the first time it starts. After the first start, consistency is guaranteed because triggers will save every data mutation in a separate table (that teleport reads to generate batches for the target instance).

No, because changes are saved by triggers that run directly on the database. When the teleport instance is back up, those changes will be batched and transmitted.

There were no solid Postgres replicator that supports schema migrations and real-time data updates when you don't have superuser permissions on the database (read: AWS RDS), so we wrote our own in Go.