Henrique Dubugras

Henrique Dubugras learned to program because there was a video game he wanted, his parents would not buy it for him, and he worked out that code was a way around the paywall. The same instinct for going around the obstacle produced his co-founder: an argument with another Brazilian teenager on Twitter in 2012 that moved to Skype and ended in a payments company regulated directly by the country's central bank.¹

Dubugras is the co-founder of Brex, a company that provides corporate credit cards, banking, and spend-management software to startups and larger enterprises. He built Brex with Pedro Franceschi starting in 2017, served as its co-CEO for its first seven years, and later became the company's board chairman as it scaled toward a public listing and, eventually, an acquisition by Capital One. Before Brex, he and Franceschi built and sold a payments company in Brazil while both were still teenagers.

Background

Dubugras was born in 1996 and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He started coding as a child, drawn in by a practical problem rather than an abstract interest in computers: there was a paid video game he wanted to play, his parents would not buy it for him, and he discovered that learning to program was a way around the paywall.

In 2012, while still in high school, he got into an argument with another Brazilian teenager, Pedro Franceschi, on Twitter. The dispute moved to a Skype call, and the two stayed in touch. Franceschi was already working inside a Brazilian payments startup he had joined at fourteen to fix an iOS security bug, and had seen firsthand how outdated the country's payment infrastructure was; Dubugras, separately, had been trying and failing to accept payments online. Both founders have described the meeting as a case of one plus one equaling three: neither's frustration alone would have produced a company, but combined they had both a problem and the technical grounding to solve it.²

Getting started

Dubugras and Franceschi founded Pagar.me in 2013, building an online payments processor for Brazilian merchants. Neither had heard of Stripe at the time; they built their developer-facing payments product independently and only learned of the American company's existence when a contact asked if Pagar.me was "just like Stripe." Because Brazil's banking rules required a licensed entity to move money, the two teenage founders became officers of a company regulated directly by the country's central bank, and built their own connections to Brazil's card-acquiring rails rather than routing through a middleman.

Dubugras convinced Franceschi to apply to Stanford alongside him, despite Franceschi having no prior exposure to the American college admissions process; Franceschi first heard what an SAT was in mid-September, with December deadlines, and both were admitted.² After roughly three and a half years running Pagar.me, the two sold the company and left Brazil in 2016 to enroll at Stanford. They lasted three quarters before dropping out.

Their first idea for a new venture was a virtual-reality company, entered into Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch. Within a few weeks they concluded they knew too little about hardware and optics to compete, and pivoted to a problem they had encountered directly: as young, foreign founders with no credit history, they and their Y Combinator batchmates struggled to get approved for a corporate credit card, or could get one only with a personal guarantee. That gap became the founding thesis of Brex: underwrite corporate credit on a startup's cash balance rather than its founders' personal credit.²

What he built

Brex launched as a corporate charge card built specifically for startups, issuing credit based on a company's bank balance and funding history rather than a personal guarantee from its founders. The company built its own card-issuing infrastructure on top of Mastercard's network rather than relying on a third-party issuing processor, later extending that infrastructure to issue local cards in more than 100 countries. Over time Brex expanded from a single card product into a broader spend-management and banking platform, adding expense software, bill pay, and treasury accounts, and broadening its customer base from early-stage startups to large public companies.

The company raised successive rounds of venture funding, reaching a valuation of $12.3 billion in a January 2022 private round, a figure that made both Dubugras and Franceschi billionaires on paper. Brex went through a significant reset in 2023 and 2024: it cut roughly 30 percent of its staff, repriced employee equity well below the 2022 mark, and removed layers of management, moves the founders framed as necessary before an eventual public listing. In 2024, Brex ended its co-CEO structure; Franceschi became sole CEO and Dubugras moved to board chairman. In January 2026, Capital One agreed to acquire Brex for $5.15 billion in cash and stock, a deal the companies have described as moving from initial conversation to signed agreement in roughly six weeks.

How he operates

Dubugras has described taking chances, including uncomfortable, low-probability ones like cold-emailing a stranger to propose a business partnership, as central to how he approaches entrepreneurship: "Taking chances is a big part of being an entrepreneur. If you don't try, who is going to try for you?"¹ He and Franceschi built much of Brex's early engineering team through online gaming forums instead of conventional recruiting channels, on the premise that people who had built trust with each other inside multiplayer games were already comfortable working with collaborators they had never met in person. That same instinct shaped the founding partnership itself: the two committed to starting a company together before they had ever met face to face, a comfort he considers generational.¹

Dubugras also hosts HD in HD, a podcast in which he interviews other founders about how they built their companies. Across the ventures he has built, from a licensed Brazilian payments company run by teenagers to a card-issuing bank built from scratch, Dubugras has repeatedly chosen the harder, vertically integrated path over licensing someone else's infrastructure.

Where things stand

As of the mid-2020s, Dubugras serves as chairman of Brex's board, having handed day-to-day CEO responsibilities to Franceschi in 2024. Brex, under agreement to be acquired by Capital One in a deal signed in January 2026 and expected to close later that year, continues to operate as a standalone brand serving tens of thousands of business customers. Dubugras also continues to host HD in HD.

Key facts

• Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1996; started programming as a way to get around paying for a video game.
• Met co-founder Pedro Franceschi through a Twitter argument in 2012, while both were still in high school in Brazil.
• Co-founded the payments company Pagar.me with Franceschi in 2013, when both were teenagers regulated directly by Brazil's central bank.
• Co-founded Brex in 2017 after entering Y Combinator's W17 batch as a virtual-reality company and pivoting to a corporate card within weeks.
• Became a billionaire on paper in January 2022 when Brex raised funding at a $12.3 billion valuation.
• Stepped down as co-CEO in 2024 to become Brex's board chairman as Franceschi took over as sole CEO; Capital One agreed to acquire Brex for $5.15 billion in January 2026.