Fintech giant Brex eyeing additional Israeli acquisitions
“We are certainly planning to go shopping in the country,” Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras told Calcalist following the company’s announcement that it has raised an additional $300 million at a $12.3 billion valuation
Meir Orbach 11:0011.01.22
“We have acquired one company in Israel and we are very excited about what’s to come,” Henrique Dubugras, CEO of fintech company Brex, which announced on Tuesday that it has raised an additional $300 million in a Series D-2 round at a $12.3 billion valuation, told Calcalist. Brex purchased Israeli startup Weav for $50 million in August of last year and Dubugras revealed the company is eyeing additional purchases in the country. “We are excited about making additional acquisitions in Israel and are certainly planning to go shopping in the country. Weav was a very successful acquisition for us. Many of our products are developed in the country, like our e-commerce products. We are planning to recruit hundreds of new employees, including in Israel, and complete acquisitions that will accelerate this journey. The future is going to be very interesting.”
Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras (right) and Nadav Lidor. Photo: Brex
 
San Francisco-based Brex offers credit cards, business cash accounts, spend management, and bill pay software together in a single dashboard, aiming to become a fully integrated and holistic financial platform for businesses. Weav’s technology helps accelerate the connectivity of the Brex platform, allowing the company to achieve this goal quickly and further support Brex’s ability to serve customers in many different industries. Brex raised $425 million at a $7.4 billion valuation last April. Notable investors in the company include Tiger Global, Y Combinator Continuity, Ribbit Capital, DST Global, Greenoaks Capital, Lone Pine Capital, and IVP. Brex's technology is in use by several Israeli unicorns including Wiz, Next Insurance, and Gong. Its Series D-2 round was led by Greenoaks Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV). Since the company’s founding in 2017, Brex has raised a total of $1.2 billion from investors. Related articles:

Fintech giant Brex eyeing additional Israeli acquisitions

Weav Cofounder and CTO, Ambika Acharya, 27
Acharya cofounded Weav, a fintech startup offering an API for commerce platforms, allowing companies to access their customers’ transaction data in real time. This can include sales data for small businesses, helping lenders assess their risk. Brex was Weav’s first customer, and acquired the company for $50M in August 2021. 2. FarmRaise Cofounder and COO, Sami Tellatin, 29
Tellatin has an MBA/MS from Stanford and a background in soil health, farm systems, and grant writing. These things combine in FarmRaise, a startup that automates the process for farmers to apply for federal grants and loans, shrinking down an eight-form, three-hour application process to 17 minutes. FarmRaise has 250 paying customers and expects to reach $1 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2022. 3. Iron Fish Founder and CEO, Elena Nadolinski, 29
Where Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 recession, Nadolinski launched Iron Fish following the 2020 pandemic. She recognized that in a world run by digital payments, privacy must be at the forefront. Iron Fish is working on privacy technology that can be digitally wrapped around any cryptocurrency, and will be launched publicly soon. 4. 21Shares Cofounder and President, Ophelia Snyder, 29
Snyder wanted crypto investing to be easy enough for anyone to use. Her company, 21Shares, is now valued at $700M. It offers ETPs (exchange-traded products) made up of cryptocurrency baskets. The 21Shares Bitcoin ETP is traded on one of Europe’s largest exchanges, and customers don’t have to worry about managing crypto wallets. In October, Snyder filed with the SEC for what could be the first Bitcoin ETF.

Four Women Under 30 Leading In FinTech 2022

December 1, 2021
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In 2016, while Tarek Mansoor was an analyst at Goldman Sachs, He saw clients trying to hedge their investments in the event the Brexit referendum was passed. They had no direct way of doing it, and Insight became the seed of a startup idea—Kalashi, an exchange where investors could place unusual bets on future events. He founded the New York company with fellow MIT alum Luana Lopez Lara in 2018. - Advertisement -
The hardest part: regulatory approval. “We both called 65 lawyers in one day,” Mansoor says. “All of which said, ‘People have been trying to do this since the ’80s, and it’s not happening. '” But they persevered—and in November 2020, Kalshi was the first federally regulated event in American history— based trading exchange. Today you can use Kalshi to bet how many Americans will eventually get a COVID vaccine or whether this year will be the hottest on record. Billionaires Charles Schwab and Henry Kravis have invested in startups with blue-chip VC shop Sequoia. Kalshi has raised $36 million and processed $10 million in trades since its launch in July 2021. Eleven of the thirty companies on our 2022 list were crypto firms, an all-time high. - Advertisement -
Mansour and López Lara are the two honorees on the 30 Under 30 list in Finance for 2022, which includes traditional financial services, fintech and crypto. The list makers were selected from nearly a thousand nominations and assessed by an all-star set of judges, which included Paul Gu, a cofounder and head of product at fintech lender Upstart; Joy Krug, co-chief investment officer of crypto fund Pantera; Jackie Rees, former head of Square Capital and a fintech angel investor; and Lauren Taylor Wolf, a cofounder and managing partner at activist hedge fund Effective Capital. - Advertisement -
As Bitcoin reached a record price of over $68,000 in 2021, crypto entrepreneurs made a strong showing on our list. Eleven of the companies featured were crypto firms, an all-time high. One example is Antonio Juliano, the founder and CEO of DDX, a trading platform for professional investors outside the US to buy and sell cryptocurrency derivatives. During a few days in September, Dydx surpassed Coinbase in daily trading volume. Juliano expects the 19-person startup to bring in $125 million in revenue and $81 million in net profit this year. Elena Nadolinsky, the founder and CEO of privacy-focused cryptocurrency company Iron Fish, is another. Iron Fish uses a novel and advanced cryptography tool called zero-knowledge proofs to make crypto transactions private. Gallery: 2022 30 Under 30: The Standouts
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While non-fungible tokens (NFTs) debuted this year, Alex Atlah, cofounder and CTO of major NFT marketplace OpenC, has helped his company reach $300 million in revenue from less than $1 million last year. Now he is well on his way to becoming one of crypto’s newest billionaires. Many list makers are also involved in fintech. Scott Kazmirowicz and Michael Spelfogel launched Cardless in 2019, creating software that allows brands to launch their own co-branded credit cards. He has drawn cards for pro sports teams such as the Boston Celtics, Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Marlins. According to Pitchbook, Cardless has raised over $50 million and is valued at $315 million. Aakash Magoon founded the insurtech startup Nayya, which helps people with tasks like choosing the most cost-effective health insurance plan and finding a low-cost pharmacy. It has 400 corporate clients and is on track to reach revenue of $7 million in 2021. Ambika Acharya founded Weave, which collects sales data for small businesses and makes it easily accessible, allowing lenders to view it in seconds to assess borrower risk. Corporate credit card startup Brex was Weav’s first customer, which used it to power its instant payments feature. In August 2021, Brex bought Weav for $50 million. Traditional financial services leaders made up a third of our list. Hannah Buchan is a partner at Beehouse, a $300 million investment firm focused on the legal cannabis industry, which has invested tens of millions of dollars in private equity, stock and loan deals. Alex Nesbit is a principal at BC Partners, helping close deals such as the $3.4 billion SPAC merger and IPO between Sixtera Technologies, one of the largest data center companies in the US, and Starboard Value Acquisition Corp., a blank check company. And Mason Liang is a portfolio manager at Millennium Management, a $50 billion hedge fund, where he oversees one of the largest teams in charge of the firm’s “quantamental” strategy, which uses quantitative and analytical tools to assess investments. Combines fundamental analysis. This year’s list was a team effort by Jeff Coughlin, Michael Del Castillo and Maria Abreu. For a link to our full finance list, Click here And for full 30 under 30 coverage, Click here,
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From Fintech’s Top Founders To Wall Street’s Best Dealmakers: 30 Under 30 Finance 2022

Earlier today, spend management startup Ramp said it has raised a $300 million Series C that valued it at $3.9 billion. It also said it was acquiring Buyer, a “negotiation-as-a-service” platform that it believes will help customers save money on purchases and SaaS products. The round and deal were announced just a week after competitor Brex shared news of its own acquisition — the $50 million purchase of Israeli fintech startup Weav. That deal was made after Brex’s founders invested in Weav, which offers a “universal API for commerce platforms.”
From a high level, all of the recent deal-making in corporate cards and spend management shows that it’s not enough to just help companies track what employees are expensing these days. As the market matures and feature sets begin to converge, the players are seeking to differentiate themselves from the competition. But the point of interest here is these deals can tell us where both companies think they can provide and extract the most value from the market. These differences come atop another layer of divergence between the two companies: While Brex has instituted a paid software tier of its service, Ramp has not. Earning more by spending less
Let’s start with Ramp. Launched in 2019 , the company is a relative newcomer in the spend management category. But by all accounts, it’s producing some impressive growth numbers. As our colleague Mary Ann Azevedo wrote :
Since the beginning of 2021, the company says it has seen its number of cardholders on its platform increase by 5x, with more than 2,000 businesses currently using Ramp as their “primary spend management solution.” The transaction volume on its corporate cards has tripled since April, when its last raise was announced. And, impressively, Ramp has seen its transaction volume increase year over year by 1,000%, according to CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman. Ramp’s focus has always been on helping its customers save money: It touts a 1.5% cash back reward for all purchases made through its cards, and says its dashboard helps businesses identify duplicitous subscriptions and license redundancies. Ramp also alerts customers when they can save money on annual versus monthly subscriptions, which it says has led many customers to do away with established T&E platforms like Concur or Expensify. All told, the company claims that the average customer saves 3.3% per year on expenses after switching to its platform — and all that is before it brings Buyer into the fold.

Ramp and Brex draw diverging market plans with M&A strategies

Israel API Developer Weav Acquired for US$50 Million
US-based fintech company Brex has acquired Israeli Application Programming Interface (API) developer Weav for US$50 million, according to a recent statement. The acquisition marks Brex’s entry into Israel . Weav’s co-founder and CEO Nadav Lidor will helm Brex’s team in Israel. Founded only last year, the company has raised US$4.5 million in seed funding so far. Its backers include Foundation Capital and Y Combinator, as well as Brex co-founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi. The company was part of Y Combinator’s W20 batch. The Israeli startup develops APIs for commerce platforms to access real-time, standardised data. The company helps to connect multiple platforms with a single API. The company’s solution has a number of use cases, including underwriting, real-time financial products, planning and analysis, identity verification and payments. The company’s API call volume has grown by 300% each month, the statement said. Meanwhile, Brex provides credit cards, business cash accounts, spend management and bill pay software on a single dashboard. By acquiring Weav, the company aims to boost its efforts to become a fully integrated B2B financial platform, and improve third-party integrations. Brex and Weav have previously worked together
In March last year, Weav’s technology was used to power Brex’s Instant Payouts for Shopify. A month later, Dubugras and Franceschi participated in a US$4.3 million fundraise by Weav. Through the acquisition, the nine-person team at Weav will be expanded through hiring efforts. Henrique Dubugras
“We want to build this all-in-one finance platform. That was already the direction we were headed with the partnership but this acquisition helps us so that we can build a better integration across all our financial products, and we can do more, and a lot faster than what we were originally planning,”

Israel API Developer Weav Acquired for US$50 Million

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Viber

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Weav's technology is intended to provide organizations with real-time, user-permissioned commerce data, which they may utilize to develop new financial products for small enterprises.Its products enable clients to connect to different platforms using a single API designed exclusively for commerce platforms used by enterprises to sell items and services.On August 17th, 2021, Weav was acquired by Brex at a valuation of $50M.

Weav

Brex

Name	Work History	Title	Status
Ambika Acharya	Apple, Stanford University, and Genentech	Founder, Chief Technology Officer	Current
Avikam Agur	WeWork, Pagaya, Microsoft, Cellebrite, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev	Founder	Current
Nadav Lidor	Google, Stanford University, and Viber	Founder, Chief Executive Officer	Current

Name	Ambika Acharya	Avikam Agur	Nadav Lidor
Work History	Apple, Stanford University, and Genentech	WeWork, Pagaya, Microsoft, Cellebrite, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev	Google, Stanford University, and Viber
Title	Founder, Chief Technology Officer	Founder	Founder, Chief Executive Officer
Status	Current	Current	Current

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