When Henrique Dubugras started getting legal notices about a video game that the then 14-year-old had hacked together and put on the internet for free – his own version of a popular Korean online roll playing game – his parents were not pleased.
“I got these legal notifications saying I was breaking some sort of patents because of this game,” Dubugras says. “I really didn’t know what patents were, but my mom got, like, super upset and told me to shut everything [down].”
“But because of this game, I learned how to code and that changed the rest of my life.”
Today, Dubugras, 25, is the co-founder and CEO of corporate credit card start-up Brex, which valued at roughly $7.4 billion. Dubugras and his co-founder, Pedro Franceschi, 24, are reportedly each worth $400 million.
And Brex isn’t even the first successful company they’ve started. In 2016 they sold their first payments company, Pagar.me, for “tens of millions,” Dubugras said in 2018. The company is now part of Stone, a $19 billion start-up, and one of the largest payments companies in Brazil, where the two co-founders grew up.
But Brex is their baby. Today the company boasts 10,000 corporate customers, including start-ups like Boxed and Outdoor Voices. And with its recent $425 million fundraising round, led by investment firm Tiger Global, Brex has now raised more than $940 million from investors that also include Y Combinator and PayPal co-founders Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, along with more than $300 million in credit lines from Barclays and Credit Suisse.
Dubugras wants Brex to keep growing to provide corporate credit cards to more and more companies all over the world, so that “every growing company can realize their full potential,” he says.
But most importantly, he says he wants to stick with Brex for the long haul.
“Sometimes people call us serial entrepreneurs,” Dubugras says of himself and Franceschi. “We never wanted to be serial entrepreneurs. We just wanted to build one company and work on it for, like, 30 years. That’s our dream and it’s what we want to do with Brex.”
Brex Co-Founder & CEO Henrique Dubugras speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 at Moscone Convention Center on October 02, 2019 in San Francisco, California.
