This $12 Billion Startup Nearly Imploded. When the Founders Revealed Their Wild Plan to Save It, Their Team Was Like, 'Whaaat?' Brex made a corporate credit card that was a runaway success. But when they started making a bunch of other stuff, things went south. So they came up with an ambitious plan to reverse course.

When a handful of Brex executives traveled to Santa Barbara for a leadership offsite in August 2021, instead of enjoying the breezy California beaches, they filed into a windowless, subterranean hotel meeting room. There, they holed up for three days — debating, soul-searching, and hair-pulling, their stress ricocheting off the four walls around them.

They were there to save the company.

Back in 2018, before Brex came along, founders often had a problem: Because many had no personal or business credit history, they were unable to get a corporate credit card — even if they'd just raised millions of dollars. Brex became a very Silicon Valley way of solving that problem: The company was founded by two Brazilian immigrants, one 19, the other 20, who had dropped out of Stanford and practically reinvented the very nature of how a startup credit card could work. Four months after debuting their breakthrough card, they raised over $100 million and achieved unicorn status — then grew to 1,200 employees in three years. "That's when everything started breaking," says cofounder Henrique Dubugras.