Capital One Financial Corporation agreed on January 22, 2026 to acquire Brex, the San Francisco-based corporate card and spend management company, in a stock-and-cash transaction valued at $5.15 billion. The bank announced the deal alongside its fourth-quarter 2025 results.
Brazil Journal reported that half of the price would be paid in cash and half in Capital One shares. The companies did not publish per-share terms. The deal was expected to close in the middle of calendar 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
Pedro Franceschi, Brex's co-founder and chief executive, will continue to lead the company inside Capital One. The bank did not say how Brex's products would be combined with its existing commercial banking business.
What Brex built
Brex started in 2017 as a corporate card for startups that struggled to get credit from traditional banks. It later added spend management software, business banking and real-time payments. According to Capital One's announcement, Brex uses AI agents to automate expense and accounting work and reduce manual review, and it also offers an AI assistant for routine tasks such as matching receipts to expenses.
Capital One said more than 25,000 companies in over 50 countries run their finances on Brex, naming DoorDash, TikTok, Anthropic, Robinhood, CrowdStrike, Zoom, Plaid, Intel, SeatGeek and the Boston Celtics among them. Crowdfund Insider cited a higher figure of more than 35,000 companies. In September 2025, Brex had announced plans to support stablecoin payments, starting with USDC, according to Decrypt's report on the deal.
“Brex invented the integrated combination of corporate credit cards, spend management software and banking together in a single platform. They have taken the rarest of journeys for a fintech, building a vertically integrated platform from the bottom of the tech stack to the top.”
Why Capital One is buying
Capital One is best known for consumer credit cards. It reported $475.8 billion in deposits and $669.0 billion in total assets as of December 31, 2025. The Brex purchase followed its $35 billion acquisition of Discover Financial, which closed the previous year and gave the bank its own card network, Brazil Journal noted.
Richard Fairbank, Capital One's founder, chairman and chief executive, said the company had set out from the start to build a payments company at the frontier of technology, and that buying Brex would speed that up, especially in business payments. He credited Brex with being the first to combine corporate cards, spend management software and banking in one platform.
Franceschi said the deal would pair Brex's payments expertise and software with Capital One's scale, underwriting and brand, so that the combined business could offer finance tools to the millions of businesses in the mainstream US economy more quickly. Investors were less enthusiastic on the day: Brazil Journal reported that Capital One's shares fell as much as 5% in after-hours trading before ending that session down 3.2%.
The founders and the funding
Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras, both from Brazil, founded Brex in 2017, when they were 20 and 21 years old. They had earlier built the payments company Pagar.me, which was sold to Stone, and dropped out of Stanford to start Brex. The two ran the company as co-CEOs until 2024, when Dubugras became chairman, according to Brazil Journal.
Ribbit Capital led a $7 million Series A shortly after Brex was founded. Other early backers named in coverage of the deal included Y Combinator, Kleiner Perkins, DST Global, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. Coverager reported that Brex raised $1.7 billion in equity and debt in total, including a $300 million round at a $12.3 billion valuation in January 2022 and a $235 million debt facility in January 2025.
A sale below the last valuation
The $5.15 billion price was less than half of the 2022 valuation. It was, however, above the roughly $3.9 billion at which Brex shares had traded on the secondary market, according to Caplight data cited by The Information and reported by Brazil Journal. The same report said that two years earlier Brex had been burning about $17 million a month, and that rival Ramp, founded two years after Brex, had been valued at $32 billion in a November funding round.
How much individual shareholders receive will depend on liquidation preferences in Brex's funding rounds, which can give later investors priority when a company sells below their entry price. Early backers still made large gains: Brazil Journal, citing TechCrunch, said the value of the earliest investors' stakes had grown more than 700 times.
Bank of America advised Capital One, with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz as legal counsel. Centerview Partners advised Brex, which worked with Wilson Sonsini and Simpson Thacher.
