Brex pivots to enterprise spend management

Brex’s 2022 move marked a shift from a fast growing startup card business into enterprise finance software, where the real prize is owning the rules and workflows behind company spending, not just issuing the card. Brex stopped chasing broad SMB volume and launched Empower to sell into larger finance teams that need approval chains, budgets, reporting, reimbursements, and tighter control across many employees, entities, and systems.

• Empower is the spend management layer that sits on top of cards and payments. In practice, that means finance teams can set approval rules, issue virtual or physical cards, route purchases through policy, and sync everything into systems like ERP and travel tools. That puts Brex closer to Concur, Coupa, and Teampay than to a simple corporate card.
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• The customer changed along with the product. Small startups mainly wanted instant approval, high limits, and no personal guarantee. Enterprise buyers care about multi entity controls, multi currency support, audit trails, SSO, HR and ERP integrations, and clean reconciliation across thousands of employees. That is a different product build and a different sales motion.
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• This also changed how Brex competes. Ramp kept pushing toward a broader all in one finance stack, while Brex increasingly positioned card and spend management as a best of breed point solution that can plug into enterprise leaders like Navan for travel and Coupa for procurement. That makes Brex easier to buy inside large companies where different teams own different budgets and workflows.
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From here, the upmarket path is about turning card distribution into durable software and platform revenue. If Brex keeps winning the card and spend control layer inside large global companies, it can expand from employee spend into travel, procurement, bill pay, and embedded payments, and move further away from the low moat startup card market it began in.