Before the coronavirus outbreak, Brex had raised $615 million in equity and debt funding. Brex has about $300 million on its balance sheet, according to sources familiar with the company.
Today co-founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi are bracing for a harsher reality. Reeling from the coronavirus shutdowns, Brex customers including Airbnb, Outdoor Voices and ClassPass are slashing costs and cutting thousands of jobs. A replay of the 2001 dot-com crash, which wiped out a generation of promising upstarts, could be Brex’s death knell. It has already cut credit limits to reduce its exposure, losing out on revenue it might have generated from these customers and angering some borrowers because it didn’t warn them in advance.