American credit card provider Capital One is to acquire FinTech firm Brex in a deal worth $5.15 billion.

The deal, set to be concluded by mid-2026, will see Capital One pay for Brex in shares and cash and bolster its corporate finance offering.

Founded in 2017, Brex offers a comprehensive range of products and services to help businesses make more informed financial decisions.

These include a corporate credit card, business banking, spend management tools, accounts payable, travel and expense management, and accounting automation.

Brex has also ventured into the emerging field of agentic artificial intelligence, offering AI agents that can manage, audit and even approve expenses on behalf of companies.

It’s widely credited with combining traditional financial services, such as credit cards, with modern financial management software in the business-to-business space.

Richard D. Fairbank, founder, chairman and chief executive of Capital One, said his firm’s acquisition of Brex would accelerate its long-time ambition of becoming “a payments company at the frontier of the technology revolution”.

He said this will specifically be the case for business payments, given Brex’s history of using technological advancements to streamline all types of corporate finances.

“Brex invented the integrated combination of corporate credit cards, spend management software and banking together in a single platform,” he said. “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.”

Since launching nearly a decade ago, Brex has grown its customer base exponentially. Today, it works with more than 25,000 companies of all sizes.

High-profile customers include the likes of DoorDash, TikTok, Anthropic, Robinhood, Crowdstrike, Zoom, Plaid, Intel, SeatGeek and the Boston Celtics.

Pedro Franceschi, founder and chief executive of Brex, hopes to build on this success by partnering with Capital One and continuing to lead his company once the acquisition is finalised. He will be managed by Frank LaPrade, Capital One’s chief enterprise services officer.

The chief exec said: “Together, we’ll maximise founder mode by combining Brex’s payments expertise and spend management software with Capital One’s massive scale, sophisticated underwriting, and compelling brand to accelerate growth and increase the speed at which we can offer better finance solutions to the millions of businesses in the U.S. mainstream economy.”

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