Capital One buys Brex for $5.15B, ending the Fintech’s IPO dreams

Capital One Financial agreed to acquire fintech startup Brex for $5.15 billion in a mix of cash and stock, drawing the curtain on a company that once talked openly about taking on American Express. The deal landed with a thud rather than a bang.

The news, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, surfaced alongside Capital One’s fourth-quarter earnings and confirmed what many insiders had already begun to accept: Brex’s run as an independent giant-in-the-making was over.

“Capital One Financial agreed to buy the fintech Brex for $5.15 billion in cash and stock, in a deal that could give the credit-card issuer more firepower with corporate clients,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Brex was founded in 2017 by Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, two Brazilian engineers who had already built and sold Pagar.me, a payments processor that handled more than $1.5 billion in gross merchandise volume. Their ambition in the U.S. market was plain from the start. Brex set out to rebuild corporate finance tools for technology companies, starting with a credit card that sidestepped traditional underwriting models. Inside one of its offices, the Wi-Fi password famously read “BuyAmex,” a wink at the incumbents the founders believed had lost touch with younger businesses.

That confidence showed up publicly, too. In a 2021 deep dive, Brex and its rival Ramp argued that “older institutions such as American Express and Capital One have overlooked the needs of some businesses.” Time has a way of reshaping those claims. Capital One ended up as Brex’s buyer.

Capital One Acquires Brex for $5.15B, Closing the Chapter on a Startup That Wanted to Disrupt AmEx

The price tells its own story. At $5.15 billion, the deal sits well below Brex’s peak private valuation of $12.3 billion in early 2022. Investors took a haircut, even with the transaction landing above the $3.9 billion secondary-market valuation tracked by Caplight. For shareholders staring at weak exit options across fintech, the outcome still looks preferable to waiting.

Brex came close to profitability. As of last September, Franceschi told the Financial Times the company stood a quarter or two away from the black. Revenue had climbed past $700 million on an annualized basis, with growth running north of 45% year over year. Those numbers reflected a rebound after a brutal stretch. The 2022 venture slowdown slashed spending across Brex’s startup-heavy customer base and forced deep cost cuts. In 2024, TechStartups reported that Brex was burning roughly $17 million a month, sparking real concern about how long its independence would last.

Capital One approached the deal from a very different position. The bank closed last year’s $35 billion acquisition of Discover Financial, giving it rare control over both issuing and network infrastructure in the card market. Against that backdrop, Brex registers as a modest addition. On an earnings call, CEO Richard Fairbank pointed out that the purchase price represented about 3.5% of Capital One’s roughly $149 billion market capitalization. Fairbank praised Brex’s technology and its appeal to corporate clients, framing the acquisition as a way to sharpen Capital One’s position with businesses managing cards, expenses, and treasury flows.

Markets showed little enthusiasm. Capital One shares slid nearly 5% in after-hours trading following the announcement, even as the bank reported quarterly net income of $2.1 billion, roughly double the figure from a year earlier. Investors appeared to be less focused on Brex’s software and more on the broader question of integration risk, at a time when banks already face pressure from fintechs and crypto-native payment rails.

From ‘BuyAmex’ to Buyout: Capital One Picks Up Brex at a Discount as Fintech’s Big Ambitions Meet Market Reality

For Brex, the sale ends a long flirtation with public markets. The company had been viewed as an IPO candidate for 2026. Recent listings offered cautionary tales. Consumer fintech Chime trades near its June debut price, reinforcing boardroom doubts about whether going public still maximizes value. The decision to sell appears to be shaped by that reality.

Franceschi, who will join Capital One after the deal closes, tried to strike an upbeat tone. He said that “together we’ll maximize founder mode” by combining Brex with Capital One. The line landed awkwardly for those who remember Brex’s early rhetoric about outgrowing banks rather than joining them.

The broader context matters. Payments sit at a crossroads, with fintech startups and crypto platforms pressing into territory long controlled by banks. Regulatory signals have shifted, with the Trump administration indicating lighter scrutiny of bank–fintech partnerships. That environment makes acquisitions like this easier to justify, even when the target once promised disruption.

Brex did not conquer the corporate card world. It did prove that modern software, flexible underwriting, and fast-moving product teams could pull meaningful share from legacy players. Capital One now owns that lesson, along with the codebase and customer relationships that came with it. For Brex’s founders and early believers, the outcome closes a chapter that began with bravado and ends with a sober exit—one shaped less by hype and more by how unforgiving the market has become.