Today, Brex and Capital One are announcing the largest bank-fintech deal in history for $5.15B, joining forces to build the most important financial platform for businesses in the US.

We started Brex in 2017 by inventing a new category of company that brings together financial services and software into one platform: cards with smart controls, expenses that file themselves, accounting fully automated from the moment you swipe, and bank accounts that pay your bills. By pairing every money movement with instant control and accountability, Brex ensures every dollar moves with purpose, precision, and speed towards a company’s goals. And it is clear our vision resonated – we’re proud to serve tens of thousands of businesses today, from 1 in 3 startups in the US, to over 300+ public companies, and some of the most important enterprises on the planet.

The journey of Brex and Capital One rhymes in many ways. Thirty years ago, Capital One pioneered the concept of fintech. Rich Fairbank founded the company with the idea that data and technology would revolutionize consumer credit card underwriting. And it did. Capital One became the 6th largest bank and the 3rd largest credit card in the US, and one of the most tech-forward banks in the world, serving millions of consumers and businesses.

Spending time with Rich and the Capital One team, it was clear that this combination would be unlike any other bank M&A in history, because Capital One is not a normal bank. This isn’t a story about cost synergies. It’s a story about growth acceleration, about two founder-led companies coming together to bring a better way to manage money to millions of businesses in the mainstream US economy, who are dramatically underserved by traditional banks.

To give you a sense of the scale of what we’ll build together, Capital One today operates orders of magnitude ahead of Brex on almost any metric: $900B in annual card GMV, $700B in assets, $150B in market cap, a $6B marketing budget, and a $6B R&D budget. By combining Brex’s technology, product, and go-to-market success with Capital One’s unprecedented scale, brand, distribution, and balance sheet, we will supercharge our go-to-market and product development with levels of investment that will accelerate our mission by over a decade.

As I got to know the Capital One team, I was so impressed by their humility, ambition, intellectual rigor, and deep respect for technology. The mutual admiration and cultural overlap with Brex was striking from day 1. Both of us share an appreciation for building things the way they should work, not taking shortcuts, and painstakingly building from the bottom of the stack up – even if it means being misunderstood for a long time. Just as we invested seven years in building the only global card-issuing infrastructure that can power local cards in 50+ countries, Capital One spent two decades reinventing consumer underwriting using machine learning across credit cards and auto loans. It requires a special kind of culture, team, and founder DNA to repeatedly and boldly invest ahead of others.

Upon regulatory approvals and closing of this transaction, Brex will become part of Capital One. But instead of fully integrating our businesses, Rich and I decided to take a different approach. I will continue to lead Brex, pursuing our same mission with Ben Gammell and our leadership team, and I will report to Frank LaPrade. Frank’s mission will be to leverage every part of Capital One to co-create with me the most ambitious plan to accelerate our business. I couldn’t think of a better person to help us with this. Frank is an exceptionally smart and humble leader who runs big parts of Capital One, including the engineering and marketing organizations, and has been at the company for 30 years. What this means is continuity in how we operate today, with access to far greater resources over time.

Almost exactly two years ago, I asked you to embark with me on the journey of reaccelerating growth with Brex 3.0, and earn the right to be ambitious again. We all know how hard it was to get here, and how the journey profoundly transformed the company and each one of us for the better. Perhaps the most special part of today is being able to tell you it was all worth it. Not only did we succeed in making Brex an exceptional company again, but in doing so, we earned the right to forever cement Brex’s place in the US financial system and continue transforming how businesses manage their money for decades to come.

I’m a builder at heart, and nothing is more rewarding for a builder than to watch their creation outscale and outlast their wildest dreams. Building Brex with each one of you has been the proudest accomplishment of my life. I am just so grateful to each of you, our customers, investors, advisors, ex-employees, mentors, my wife, family and friends who helped us get here.

2026 marks my 15th year in fintech (over half of my life!), and I believe the years ahead scaling Brex in this unique setup will be the most impactful years of my career. I am so grateful to Rich, Frank, and the Capital One team for giving us the opportunity to play this game at an unprecedented level of scale and ambition.

We started Brex with the idea of Dreaming Big, and I’m so excited to work with Capital One on a dream that’s bigger than it's ever been.

Onwards!

Pedro