
Case study / Life sciences
Time savings that speed up science
The Brex Difference
8 minutes
Application Time
2 days
Implementation Time
Card Issuance, Spend controls
Pain Points
Lab supplies, Travel
Top Spend Categories
Company Info
Hugo Peris
Founders
2016
Founded
San Francisco, CA
Headquarters
10
Employee Count
$10.2M (Series A)
Funding
Spiral Therapeutics is a clinical stage pharmaceutical company delivering novel therapies for hearing loss.
LPT99 finally reached its phase I clinical trial after two years of development. Spiral Therapeutics was able to attract more than $10 million in venture funding on the promise of its new formula. The team was feeling great. The company was doing everything right. But there never seemed to be enough time in the day.
Nik Talreja, Spiral’s VP of Finance and Operations, has the sometimes herculean task of making sure Spiral Therapeutics’ R&D efforts don’t slow down as a result of manual administrative tasks. “Our purchasing process definitely qualified. Every minute our scientists spend on anything but research adds to the time patients will have to wait for our innovative solutions.”
Purchase requests for suppliers like Millipore Sigma and VWR and tickets to important industry conferences piled up. They had to pass through a single personally-guaranteed credit card that only one manager had access to. Nik wanted a faster, easier way to free up his team to get back to research related to novel therapies.
Nik found Brex after a Google search for “no personal guarantee business card.”
"We signed up for Brex because of its simple value proposition: instantly available credit; the ability to offer cards to our entire team and actively monitor spend; and its integration with our accounting platform, and no-fee structure. Brex offered us the ability to merge corporate card services and expense management with the bonus of realizable rewards.”
The single-card bottleneck was removed overnight as Nik issued cards to everyone with purchasing authority. He also saved his finance team double-digit hours per month with Brex’s QuickBooks integrations that apply automated reconciliation.
Nik isn’t looking back after nine months of using Brex. “It gave us the ability to easily onboard team members and actively monitor spend for our business-specific categories. This is absolutely key in our industry and company stage, as we need to keep close track of spending to project our runway in order to plan for clinical trials and anticipate regulatory compliance.”
The easy controls and visibility Brex provided Spiral generated significant time savings that Spiral Therapeutics continues to invest in delivering unmet hearing loss therapies faster.