Pedro Franceschi

Running Brex inside Capital One

Pedro Franceschi is the co-founder and chief executive of Brex. Capital One announced on January 22, 2026 that it would acquire the company for $5.15 billion in cash and stock, with Franceschi continuing to lead it, and completed the acquisition on April 7, 2026. Capital One describes Brex, founded in 2017, as an AI-native software platform for intelligent finance that combines a corporate card, spend-management software and banking in one product.^[1][2]

Banking Dive reported that Brex shareholders would receive $2.75 billion in cash and 10.6 million Capital One shares, and that about 25,000 companies use Brex, including Anthropic, DoorDash and Zoom. Capital One said Brex uses AI agents to automate complex workflows and reduce manual review.^[2][1]

Two teenagers from Rio

Franceschi comes from Rio de Janeiro. He met Henrique Dubugras at 16, and the two co-founded Pagar.me, a Brazilian payments company. TechCrunch reported in 2018 that Pagar.me had raised $30 million and was processing up to $1.5 billion in transactions when it was sold. Both enrolled at Stanford in fall 2016 and left to work on their next company full time.^[3]

Founding Brex

The pair entered Y Combinator with a virtual-reality startup called Beyond and dropped it about three weeks in. Brex was founded in 2017 (TechCrunch gives April 2017) and launched publicly in June 2018. It offered startup founders corporate credit cards with no personal guarantee or security deposit, ran on software the team wrote from scratch rather than on legacy technology, and could set credit limits up to ten times higher than founders could get elsewhere, according to the report.^[3]

On October 5, 2018 Brex announced a $125 million Series C at a $1.1 billion valuation, led by Greenoaks Capital, DST Global and IVP, bringing total funding to about $200 million. TechCrunch's headline noted that the founders were 22. Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and former Visa CEO Carl Pascarella were among its backers.^[3]

From startup cards to a broader platform

Brex later added travel, expense management and payments software and moved up-market from startups to larger customers. Banking Dive, citing PitchBook, put its peak valuation at $12.3 billion, while TechCrunch dates that valuation to January 2022, after a $300 million raise. The company has raised about $1.7 billion across 14 rounds, per Crunchbase figures cited by Banking Dive, from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Ribbit Capital. The Wall Street Journal reported Brex oversees about $13 billion in customer deposits.^[2][4]

Becoming sole CEO

For its first seven years Brex ran with two chief executives. On June 12, 2024 the company ended the co-CEO model: Franceschi became sole CEO and Dubugras became board chairman. TechCrunch said Franceschi had built the core financial infrastructure and led the organization, while Dubugras handled fundraising, banking partners and regulators. The founders said the structure risked slowing decisions at scale and that public investors would likely prefer a single CEO.^[4]

The same report described a leaner company. Brex cut 136 jobs (11 percent of staff) in October 2022 and 282 (about 20 percent) in January 2024, leaving about 1,000 employees. Franceschi said the company had halved its cash burn over the past year, and the founders targeted cash-flow positivity in 2025. Revenue came mainly from interchange, with software, interest and foreign-exchange fees on top.^[4]

The Capital One deal

Banking Dive noted that the $5.15 billion price was nearly 60 percent below the $12.3 billion valuation PitchBook recorded. Capital One chairman and CEO Richard Fairbank said Brex pioneered combining cards, spend management and banking in one platform and called the deal a major opportunity in business payments, pairing Brex's technology with Capital One's scale, underwriting and brand. Franceschi said Brex was built on the belief that finance teams should not have to choose between speed and control and that the combination lets Brex deliver both at greater scale. Banking Dive named Ramp, Mercury and Expensify among rivals.^[1][2]

After the deal closed

In an interview published on April 7, 2026, the day the sale closed, Franceschi told Bloomberg Linea that he still works on Brex daily and does not see the deal as an exit, although he acknowledged that from a capital perspective it is one. He put Brex at roughly 1.5 percent of the US market, leaving about 98 percent to win, and named Ramp and Mercury as competitors. He said he wants Brex to become the way every company thinks about and manages money, and pointed to Capital One's research-and-development spending of about $6 billion a year as a sign of what the combination can fund.^[5]

The article also describes the roughly two and a half years before the sale as a turnaround that included a restructuring the company called Brex 3.0, the move to a single CEO and the removal of two management layers.^[5]

Why he matters

Franceschi's path, from a teenage payments business in Brazil to a Y Combinator company to a bank acquisition, tracks the rise of software-first corporate finance. Brex helped make cards for startups a category and then had to prove it could mature into a broader, disciplined business. How it performs under Capital One will test whether a bank can absorb a fintech without losing its product pace.^[2][3][4]

On The Executive List

Pedro Franceschi is ranked No. 20 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Technology Officers discipline. The list row shows CTO; he is Brex's CEO, and the company is now part of Capital One. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.