Real story…  2 Brazilian (yeah, non-US) 22-year-old guys (yeah, they are pretty young) who managed to build a unicorn within 16 months.

How did they do it?

1. They both started coding early – at 9 and 14, even though their parents didn’t support their hobby.

2. At 14 they launched their first startup and failed. Then – a second startup with 800K users and failed.

3. At 20 they managed to succeed finally with their new startup (Stripe for Brazil). They raised $30M in funding and then – sold it.

4. In 2016, they enrolled in Stanford and moved to the US.

5. In January 2017, they were accepted to Y Combinator with a VR startup. But soon they realized that it’s not their strongest area, while fintech is what they really are good at. So they closed the VR startup.

6. While still being in Y Combinator, they pivoted to solve the problem nobody had solved before – they decided to offer corporate credit cards for startups without a need to be physically presented in a bank (through online application), with no personal guarantees, no security deposit required and powered by the Visa network. (I know you need this service :))

7. The problem was so huge and so unsolved that half of all Y-combinator residents instantly subscribed for their service.

8. By the end of the accelerator their company Brex.com had around 1000 customers and received over $57M in funding from incredible leaders in the fintech space: PayPal founders Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and former Visa CEO Carl Pascarella.

9. Suddenly, they became the default credit card company for all Silicon Valley startups (and for you :)).

10. At the end of September, they landed $125 million in funding from Greenoaks Capital and DST Global and became a $1.1 billion unicorn.

Crazy growth comes naturally when you solve a huge problem previously solved by no one + when you gain access to the most valuable IT/investors network in the world provided by Y Combinator.
That’s how Brex was born.

Read the full story here.