Brex, the once-startup darling of corporate cards, is doubling down on partnerships over platform sprawl. In a surprising yet strategic move, the fintech has teamed up with Zip, a fellow venture-backed upstart in enterprise procurement, to embed its virtual cards into Zip’s workflow engine—streamlining enterprise spend from procurement to payment.
The tie-up, announced exclusively to TechCrunch, highlights a broader shift in Brex’s strategy: fewer in-house builds, more ecosystem bets. Just last year, Brex partnered with travel-expense rival Navan (formerly TripActions) on a bundled offering. Now, it’s doing the same with Zip—a procurement player it once might’ve tried to compete with head-on.
The collaboration is about more than functionality. It’s about survival and scale. Brex has long talked about becoming a “financial operating system” for businesses, but revenue still leans heavily on interchange. Enterprise ambitions have stretched Brex’s capabilities, pushing it to acknowledge the cost and complexity of building everything itself.
Zip, for its part, brings deep traction with large buyers like OpenAI, Snowflake, Reddit, and Sephora. It claims to have never lost an enterprise customer—a signal of product fit in a procurement-heavy environment that Brex admits it can’t replicate on its own. Their joint customers already include Anthropic, Coinbase, Carta, Gong, and Neuralink.
This pragmatic approach comes as Brex tries to tighten its financial profile. Following a January 2024 headcount reduction of nearly 20%, Brex reported a 90% drop in cash burn in Q1 year-over-year. It also saw enterprise revenue jump 70% and revenue retention rise above 130%.
Still, the company remains unprofitable—though co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi says Brex is on track to reach profitability by year-end. A public listing is still on the horizon, but “only when ready,” Franceschi emphasized, citing governance and market timing as key considerations.
By leaning into “coopetition”—where former rivals become embedded partners—Brex is betting that integration beats reinvention. With Zip, it’s creating a procurement-to-payment flow tailored for enterprise complexity, skipping the time and burn rate of building a competing product from scratch.
“It was a very natural partnership,” said Zip CEO Rujul Zaparde. “The customer base pulled it out of us.” Franceschi agreed: “We asked ourselves, how can one plus one equal five—and that’s what we’re bringing to market now.”