In the technology industry, achieving a $1 billion valuation and officially becoming a “unicorn” signals to the world that your business is making a tangible impact. Lookout got there by creating mobile threat defense solutions to help companies protect their sensitive data from mobile cybersecurity threats. With a large dataset fed by over 170 million devices, and the analysis of over 70 million mobile apps, Lookout remains the leader in mobile security.


Prioritizing investments that create the most value for the business is essential for controlling expenses especially during a period of rapid growth. With expectations high, the company’s finance team had been working hard to determine how to implement policies and procedures to ensure procurement and T&E spending would stay on budget and under administrative control.

“In a high growth environment, all teams want to spend money, and it’s the finance team’s role to monitor and balance growth with spend. We want to be efficient, but with the right levels of admin control and reporting in place,” said Mark Nasiff, Lookout’s CFO. “There wasn’t an obvious service in the market that covered all of our needs out of the box.”

Mark and his team wanted to avoid the overhead of implementing multiple card programs and searched for a single service to consolidate procurement and T&E expenses. “Procurement is tricky because that’s where most of the big ticket spend—like sales, advertising, and SaaS—is centered. Then there is travel and entertainment that has more focus on policy adherence and scalability. We were looking for a card program that makes it easy to manage both aspects.”

Mark received a cold email from Brex and was intrigued after an initial conversation. He signed up for the card—”Why not, right?” he said. “It took less than ten minutes, and we wanted to test it out. We got a limit of over $1 million on day one, which is what we needed.” They slowly shifted a few expenses to the card.

“Once we saw how easy it was to set up and manage both T&E cards and departmental P-cards, not to mention the value of the Brex rewards program, we accelerated implementation.”

“The time we spent managing cards and accounting dropped by double digit hours per month, and we started seeing a huge cash back return on that spend.”

With Brex’s technology making program management easy, the team was free to focus on running day to day finance operations, and all the other “fun” that comes with building one of the world’s fastest growing companies.