Innovating Spend Management through AI with Pedro Franceschi from Brex

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. Today we're talking to Pedro Franceschi, the co-founder and CEO of Brex. Since its inception in 2017, Brex has been building fintech tools that make employee and employer lives easier when tracking and paying expenses and beyond. So it makes sense that they're now implementing AI to make this process always annoying, even more automated for their enterprise clients. We'll talk about that in the business overall. Welcome Pedro.

**Pedro Franceschi** (0:29)
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Elad Gil** (0:30)
Thanks, yeah.

**Sarah Guo** (0:31)
So just to set context, I think the vast majority of our listeners know, but for any new customers or potential ones, can you tell us what Brex does and sort of what scale it's at today?

**Pedro Franceschi** (0:41)
Sure. Brex is a corporate card and spin management platform, and we help companies make better financial decisions and push every dollar of spend further. We serve companies from all sizes, from two founders out of YC, all the way to large public companies like DoorDash of the World, Coinbase of the World, and everything in between. We have tens of thousands of businesses as customers. One in every three startups uses Brex today. 130 public companies are also in Brex, so we have this sort of wide range of customers, which means we're pretty proud to be able to scale all of our customers from inception all the way to a really large global scale.

**Sarah Guo** (1:23)
Recently, you and Henrique shifted from co-CEOs for a long time to solo CEO. It's an uncommon arrangement, and I think a lot of founders would love to hear any advice you have on both that and then how the transition has worked.

**Pedro Franceschi** (1:40)
Yeah, so I think for many years, we were the poster child of co-CEO success. So now it's changing that.
Maybe we're just changing that pattern, I guess. But so for us, honestly, not a lot has changed in how we actually run the company day to day. So we had this co-CEO structure where Enrique was more external, I was more internal. And the reality is, at some point, we've been doing this for really 10 years almost, since our previous company in Brazil. And I think the learnings for us were at some point, we massively simplified how we run the company over the past seven months, streamlining layers of management, priorities, fewer decision makers. And there were a few decisions that there was a need for more clarity on how decisions got made. And even though Enrique and I, I think, figured it out ourselves super well over the many years as the company scaled, then we started to getting a bit closer to a different level of maturity as a company, closer to being public and things like that. It became relatively clear that it would be good to go back to the traditional governance model of CEO and chairman. And we're happy about the change, but never really changed about how we run the company, how we handle customers, how we talk to investors or anything. So it's been mostly a formalization of what's been true for a few years now.

**Elad Gil** (3:04)
It's interesting because when I look at European AI companies, there's an increasing number of them that actually have the co-CEO structure, and often it's a very technical founder plus a more business-centric or business background founder. And so that's companies like Helsing, H. Like there's a couple of these actually, and it's some of the leading companies in European AI. And I don't know why it's so Europe-specific. obviously in the US there was Robinhood and others where the ad hoc structure as well. But I find it striking that in Europe it seems like a more and more common pattern. So it's just kind of an interesting aside. Could you tell us a little bit about how Brex is starting to think about AI and some of the innovations and approaches that you're taking there?

**Pedro Franceschi** (3:41)
There's three big areas for us. One is the obvious, which is products. So how we can improve the product and make the experience of essentially expense management better. And within product, there's two areas that we spend a lot of time. Accounting is one and the other one is essentially expense assistant and expense management, basically what EA's would typically do. Second big bucket besides product is go to market and operations. So things that are very ops intensive internally. Prospecting, KYC, underwriting, compliance, lots of use cases there. And the third broad bucket is developer productivity. So how we can help engineers be more successful. And there, I don't think we've done anything particularly remarkable in this third one because we're using the same tools that folks have used, Copilot and things like that. We're experimenting with new tools, but I would say buckets one and two is where we spend the majority of time so far.