In the biggest change to the company since launching in 2018, Brex has introduced a new software platform.
Best known for its corporate credit card, the decacorn is now launching Brex Empower in a move into financial services.
The strategic shift of the company comes with the new software platform that it says will “help fast-growing companies move even faster”.
One such company joining as a new customer and one of the first users of Brex Empower is food delivery service DoorDash.
“The fastest-growing companies always look for ways to fight bureaucracy and speed up the pace of business. We designed Empower to do just that,” Brex co-founder and co-CEO Henrique Dubugras said.
“It allows companies to propel their businesses forward using spend as a strategic growth lever. Empower reflects the next chapter of Brex, one that is built from the ground-up around software to meet the needs of today’s most innovative and fast-growing companies.”
The company has laid out three aims with Empower, which will serve as the foundation for Brex products moving forward: to make it easy to do the right thing, trust and verify and increase accountability.
To allow people to “do the right thing”, it aims to eliminate receipts by automatically collecting and generating receipts by using data from credit card networks.
The company has also come up with a way to “visualise” expense policies that often go unread, it says, making them more understandable for employees.
It wants to eliminate leaders reviewing everything in a way that it deems costly and slow by making it clear for people to create and request budgets with defined expense policies.
This should allow leaders to “review by exception”, it says, as there will be defined parameters for employees, which should increase speed.
Its final aim to help teams moves faster it says will come through increasing trust by giving employees systems to hold leaders accountable.
All of these seem to come down to an overarching aim to speed up processes and reduce unnecessary bureaucracy in businesses so companies can function to their highest capacity.
This falls in line with Brex’s own ethos, as Dubugras discussed on Twitter.
“When we started Brex, we promised ourselves that no matter how big Brex got, we’d always move fast. Speed is essential to our business,” Dubugras said.
This is something they see in the sprit of companies that use Brex, he continued.
As one of the first users of Empower, DoorDash will be one of the first companies to see whether a new spend management tool can really make the difference in accelerating the speed of a business.
“Brex understands uniquely that to compete, you have to be prepared to move very fast,” DoorDash VP of finance Mike Kim said.
“We wanted to empower our employees to make decisions on their own and move fast to spend on behalf of DoorDash – with the right level of compliance and control. And with Brex Empower, we are able to solve for that.”