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Capital One To Buy Fintech Startup Brex At Less Than Half Its Peak Valuation In $5.15B Deal
Banking giant Capital One announced on Thursday that it is acquiring fintech startup Brex for $5.15 billion in a cash and stock deal. The news was big in the fintech world with Brex claiming the pairing would represent “the largest bank-fintech deal in history.” (Visa had planned to buy Plaid in 2020 for $5.3 billion until that deal fell apart a year later due to regulatory concerns.) In a joint statement, Capital One founder, chairman and CEO Richard Fairbank said it’s always been a goal of the bank “to build a payments company at the frontier of the technology revolution.” “Acquiring Brex accelerates this journey, especially in the business payments marketplace,” he said. “Brex invented the integrated combination of corporate credit cards, spend management software and banking together in a single platform. They have taken the rarest of journeys for a fintech, building a vertically integrated platform from the bottom of the tech stack to the top.” While $5 billion is no small sum, it is less than half the $12.3 billion that San Francisco-based Brex was valued at in October 2021. In total, the company has raised $1.7 billion in equity and debt since its 2017 inception — with about $1.2 billion of that being venture funding. Early investors such as Ribbit Capital, which led Brex’s $7 million Series A in 2017, are likely quite pleased with the outcome. Investors who wrote checks at its later stages are likely less so. Other early backers include Y Combinator, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and SV Angel 1 . The company has 1,100 employees, according to a Brex spokesperson who also told Crunchbase News that its business is growing 40% year over year and is profitable. Customers include Anthropic, Robinhood, DoorDash, Toast, Zoom and Intel, among others. Pedro Franceschi, CEO of Brex. [Courtesy photo] Close friends Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras, who co-founded Brex, started working together when they founded another company, Brazilian payment processing startup Pagar.me, in 2012 at the wee age of 16. That company ended up getting acquired by Stone Pagamentos for “tens of millions of dollars” — before the two had even gone to college. A change of plans Brex began its life as a buzzy startup that served mostly other startups. But in June 2022 — three months after announcing it would make a big push into software and enterprise — Brex confirmed that it was apparently abandoning a segment it started to serve: small to medium-sized businesses. The abrupt news didn’t sit well with many of the SMBs it served. Over time, Brex began to seemingly fall behind its largest rival, Ramp, when it came to fundraising and revenue generation. Ramp as of last November was valued at $32 billion, having raised a total of $2.3 billion in equity. By joining Capital One, Brex says it will accelerate Capital One’s presence in corporate cards and spend management, complementing its existing leadership in SMB banking. Capital One’s purchase of Brex is slated to close midyear. Fintech M&A expected to pick up On the heels of a strong year for venture funding to fintech startups, sources who spoke with Crunchbase News said they expect exits — both M&A deals and IPOs — in the sector to gain steam in 2026. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Exclusive: Cambio Lands $18M At $100M Valuation For AI-Powered Commercial Real Estate Software
Cambio, a startup that has built AI-powered commercial real estate software for institutional investors, has raised $18 million in a Series A round at a $100 million valuation, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively. Maverick Ventures led the financing, which included participation from Y Combinator, Adverb and angel investors from OpenAI, Anthropic and Notion, among others. Founded in 2022 by former institutional commercial real estate operators Leia de Guzman and Stephanie Grayson, Cambio has now raised a total of $22 million. It participated in Y Combinator’s summer 2022 cohort and then went into “R&D mode.” The San Francisco-based company launched its offering at the end of 2023, and de Guzman claims it has since seen “rapid adoption” across enterprise customers and geographies — scaling to 35 countries and to more than 2 billion square feet in assets. It recently opened a London office to support EU and APAC growth. From ‘messy’ to investment-grade data Put simply, Cambio uses large language models and agentic artificial intelligence workflows to turn “messy building data into investor-grade decisions and reporting.” And it claims to do so within minutes. “Commercial real estate owners sit on thousands of pages of unstructured documents — spreadsheets, PDFs, invoices, energy audits, regulatory filings — that historically required months of manual analysis,” de Guzman told Crunchbase News. “Cambio applies large language models and agentic AI to ingest, reason over, and synthesize that data automatically, delivering investment-grade capital and compliance decisions in minutes.” Cambio, she said, is architected around agentic AI software that can reason across unstructured data, run multi-step analyses, and “continuously adapt as regulations, assets, and market conditions change.” In a nutshell, it aims to help institutional investors figure out where to deploy capital, which assets to prioritize, and how to maximize returns. Customers include Oxford Properties, Nuveen, Principal, BGO and Beacon Capital, among others. The market opportunity, according to de Guzman, is enormous: commercial real estate is estimated to be a $20 trillion-plus industry in the U.S. alone. In 2025, global real estate-related startups pulled in about $10.5 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing, per Crunchbase data. That’s up about 17% from $9 billion in 2024. An industry track record Part of Cambio’s strategy is to have built a (largely female) leadership team that has directly worked in the space it is trying to serve. De Guzman and Grayson began their careers at large institutional firms such as KKR and Oxford Properties. The startup also recently hired Goldman Sachs alumna Lizzie Leon to serve as head of product innovation. Katerina Kaimakamis, formerly of Oxford Properties and CBRE, has been tapped to serve as lead of Cambio’s European and APAC business. The moves from institutions to a startup serving them reflect a broader shift happening in commercial real estate, noted Grayson — the choice “to step inside AI transformation, and not just observe it from the sidelines.” Cambio operates an enterprise SaaS revenue model. It plans to use its new capital primarily to scale product and engineering. Ryan Isono, managing director at Maverick Ventures, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm was impressed with the fact that Cambio’s founders had spent more than two decades running commercial real estate portfolios. “That lived experience matters,” he said. “It gave them an intuitive understanding that this wasn’t a tooling problem – it was a workflow problem.” Maverick was also impressed by the fact that Cambio wasn’t trying “to bolt AI onto existing processes.” ‘Re-architecting the workflow’ “Cambio isn’t automating around the edges, it’s re-architecting the workflow end to end in an AI-native way, with a deeply product-minded approach,” Isono said. “Knowing what to build, which workflow to wedge into, and how to sequence products requires having lived these workflows, which Leia and Steph have.” The investor also praised the startup’s technical team, noting that CTO Leon Chen was one of the earliest backend engineers at Faire, a marketplace and wholesale platform that was valued at nearly $13 billion in 2022. That technical team, he said, also includes Ph.D.s with “deep expertise” in building science. “That matters because commercial real estate is fundamentally tied to the physical world. Much of the data isn’t clean or fully digitized, and automating it is meaningfully harder than in purely digital domains,” Isono said. “Solving that unlocks a uniquely valuable dataset that compounds over time.” Related Crunchbase queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
The IPO Window Won’t Stay Open On Its Own
We like to talk about the IPO window as something that’s either open or closed. But as the occupant of an old house with windows once held up with pulleys, I’ve also encountered a third type: A window that opens easily and then proceeds to slam shut on your fingers if you don’t prop it up or get out of the way. This, unfortunately, could be the window type that most closely resembles the current IPO climate. It looked pretty open as the year commenced. But it also looks like it could be slamming down. Take some of last year’s IPO darlings. Remember Figma? The design software company soared to a $68 billion valuation after more than tripling in its July debut. Today it’s valued around $14 billion — well below what Adobe planned to pay in its ill-fated acquisition attempt three years ago. The biggest fintech and crypto offerings have also fallen. Stablecoin issuer Circle is down more than two-thirds from its peak in June. Buy now, pay later provider Klarna is near the lowest point since its September IPO. And online banking platform Chime is also well below its first-day price. Two other high-profile offerings late last year — StubHub and Navan — are also down from where they started. Now, these aren’t horrible underperformances, by IPO standards. It’s not like the 2022 SPAC meltdown, when companies went from multibillion-dollar valuations to practically worthless in a few quarters. And some of last year’s splashiest market newcomers have done well, like Coreweave, which is still well above its IPO price. But still, we were hoping to see the stage set for a boom in new offerings in 2026. Seeing last year’s most talked about new market entrants largely continue to underwhelm isn’t a great backdrop to prepare for some of the biggest offerings of all time. That’s closer to understatement than exaggeration. SpaceX, which is reportedly looking to launch an IPO by this summer, was reportedly previously eyeing a valuation of $1.5 trillion, which would make it by far the most valuable new listing of all time. OpenAI and Anthropic are also considering the IPO path. OpenAI has reportedly contemplated filing this year, with a target valuation of up to $1 trillion. Anthropic, recently valued around $350 billion, is looking to potentially beat its rival to the public markets. Moreover, there’s a long list of other contenders in sectors from cybersecurity to health to defense tech. Fintech looks particularly poised for exits, with Plaid, Ramp, Monzo and Revolut among the favored pre-IPO names. One likely outcome in coming quarters is that startup backers and IPO underwriters will manage to keep the new offering window propped open long enough to get some bid deals to market. If you are a one-of-a-kind company like SpaceX, investor enthusiasm to own a piece of a category-defining player will likely be high enough to support valuations that might look crazy ambitious for anyone else. The same could apply to OpenAI. The more typical IPO candidate — say an enterprise software unicorn with a viable AI strategy and decently growing revenue — won’t have the same excitement generation capacity. So ordinary deals won’t likely be able to prop open a window. Hopefully they won’t be left in the worst position if it suddenly slams shut. Related Crunchbase queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Venture Capitalists Tap Out On Funding Our Fitness Goals
If you’ve been slogging through January on a mission to get in better shape, you’ve got company. Improving health and fitness is reliably the most popular New Year’s resolution. It’s no simple goal to achieve, of course. But these days there are almost infinite ways to spend money trying, including classes, gear, biometric trackers, supplements, and so on. Just don’t expect newly funded startups to get you to the finish line. Venture investment in the fitness and wellness space peaked about four years ago. It hit a cyclical low last year, with just over $5 billion in reported global funding. Where the money is going That said, it’s not as if investors have abandoned the space, and there are still companies securing big rounds. In recent months, the standout was Oura, maker of a smart ring that collects data on dozens of personal health and wellness metrics. In October, the 12-year-old Finnish company announced that it closed on more than $900 million at an impressive $11 billion valuation. Another longtime player in the space, fitness app Strava, reportedly reached a $2.2 billion valuation earlier this year after raising an undisclosed amount of new funding led by Sequoia Capital. And on the wellness front, LetsGetChecked, an at-home testing platform, picked up $165 million in a Series F early last year. Getting a good night’s rest is also fundamental for healthy living, and in this arena smart sleep system developer Eight Sleep was a standout. The 12-year-old company raised $100 million for its Series D last summer. Below, we put together a list of some of the larger funding recipients this past year. Outside the venture sphere, private equity and growth investors are also eyeing the intersection of fitness and AI. Last week, fitness and wellness brands Mindbody, Booker, ClassPass and EGYM announced they are merging under a parent company, Playlist. The transaction includes $785 million in new equity investment, led by Affinity Partners, and values the combined company at $7.5 billion. Where the money isn’t going Yet while investors are keen on some fitness startups strategies, others have fallen out of favor. So where is the money not going? Connected fitness equipment startups are one of the areas that have lost financial support in a big way. Shares of what used to be the sector’s most famous success story — Peloton — are down over 95% from the pandemic-era highs. Others that raised considerable capital have been mostly running on existing reserves. This includes rowing machine startup Hydrow, which raised more than $360 million between 2018 and 2022, but hasn’t had a reported financing since, per Crunchbase data. Another, smart home gym maker Tonal, secured $580 million but has not landed a fresh round in nearly three years. Prediction: More AI As we look ahead to contemplate what fitness and fitness-adjacent areas might be best primed to attract investment, it’s not quite obvious. For now, IPO activity in the space looks muted, though last week’s Playlist rollup offers a sign that acquirers see some value. Perhaps for now, the only thing one can be comfortable prognosticating is the same thing that applies to every sector on earth: that AI-enabled offerings will be more widespread and more heavily funded. Now, if only the AI could lift weights and go on runs for us too. Related Crunchbase queries: Illustration: Dom Guzman
OpenEvidence, An AI-Powered ‘Brain Extender’ For Doctors, Doubles Valuation To $12B With $250M Series D
OpenEvidence, an AI platform for doctors, announced Wednesday it has raised $250 million in a Series D funding round that doubled its valuation to $12 billion. Notably, the round marks the fourth fundraise for the Miami-based startup in less than a year. In total, OpenEvidence has raised nearly $700 million in funding since its 2021 inception and was valued at $6 billion at the time of its Series C in October. Thrive Capital and DST co-led its latest raise. Other backers include GV, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Coatue, among others. OpenEvidence describes itself as a specialized AI-powered medical search engine that serves as a “brain extender” for clinicians by providing citation-linked answers from medical literature. It reached $100 million in annual revenue in January. The platform is free to doctors and ad-supported. The raise comes at an interesting time, considering that many of the large AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are incorporating “health” offerings into their products (ChatGPT for Health and Claude for Health). For its part, OpenEvidence says that in December it supported about 18 million clinical consultations from verified physicians in the U.S., up from about 3 million consultations per month a year ago. The startup also claims that its platform is used on a daily basis, on average, by more than 40% of physicians in the U.S. today in over 10,000 hospitals and medical centers. Last year, more than 100 million Americans were treated by a doctor using OpenEvidence, according to the company. Daniel Nadler, CEO of OpenEvidence. [Courtesy photo] AI-related healthcare is one of the spaces that has seen a significant rise in funding globally, Crunchbase data shows. Overall funding to the space rose in 2025, as more startups are tackling high-pain and high-cost parts of the healthcare system. Investors put an estimated $14 billion into seed- through growth-stage funding to companies in AI-powered health tech categories in 2025, Crunchbase data shows. That means 2025 funding was 63% higher than the $8.6 billion raised in all of 2024. Related Crunchbase queries: Related Reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
European Venture Funding Nudged Higher In 2025, While AI Led For The First Time
Venture funding to Europe-based startups last year gained only slightly, around 9% year over year, reaching $58 billion, with AI emerging as the region’s leading sector for startup investment for the first time, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows. While Europe’s venture investment did not grow significantly year over year, the region saw a shift to deep tech funding in 2025. Startup investment has also now maintained well above pre-COVID levels for the past three years. Still, Europe notably has not seen the same AI-driven boost that North America has. Venture investment in North America-based companies last year soared 46% year over year, with mega rounds into AI-related companies leading the way. Table of contents Quarterly uptick European venture funding did gain steam in Q4, reaching $16.6 billion — up 20% quarter over quarter and 27% year over year — per Crunchbase data. The largest rounds in Q4 were raised by London-based energy software provider Kraken, Finland-based smart ring Oura, Paris-based customer engagement platform Brevo, Dutch online grocer Picnic, and London cloud GPU provider Nscale. AI led for the first time Last year, artificial intelligence was the leading sector for venture investment in Europe for the first time, with around $17.5 billion in funding to AI in 2025 compared to just over $10 billion in 2024. Paris-based frontier lab Mistral AI raised the largest round in the year, close to $2 billion led by Dutch chip machine manufacturer ASML. Other large European funding rounds raised last year in AI went to Nscale and Brevo as well as Munich-based defense manufacturer Helsing, London-based AI drug discovery Isomorphic Labs, and Freiburg, Germany-based image frontier lab Black Forest Labs. The second-largest sector in Europe in 2025 for startup investment was healthcare and biotech, with companies in the space raising around $13.4 billion. The third-largest sector was hardware with around $10.8 billion invested. The total demonstrates Europe’s renewed focus on deep tech including investment in data centers, wearables, defense, quantum, aerospace, robotics and energy. Financial services, once the leading sector in Europe’s venture scene, was only the fourth-largest sector for funding in 2025, with around $7.4 billion invested. UK leads but other countries gain The U.K., the leading country in Europe, raised around $17 billion. That represents about 29% of total European venture funding in 2025, down from a third of all funding in 2024. Startups based in France raised $8.5 billion and Germany-based companies came in a close third with $8.4 billion. Each nation’s startups represented about 15% of funding to the continent last year. Switzerland was the fourth-largest European country for venture investment in 2025, with $3.6 billion invested in its startups last year. The Netherlands was the fifth largest at $3.4 billion, and was followed by Spain ($2.9 billion) and Finland ($2.2 billion). With the exception of the U.K., each of those countries raised more venture funding in 2025 than in 2024. Late stage grew in Q4 Late-stage funding in Q4 reached the highest amount in two years. A total of $9.2 billion was invested across 87 deals, up 65% by amounts year over year. Early-stage funding reached $5.3 billion in Q4 across more than 250 funding rounds, down 4% year over year. Seed funding reached $2 billion in Q4 across more than 750 deals, inline with totals year over year. Leading investors Investors that led or co-led the largest fundings into the region’s startups last year were dominated by Europe-based venture and private equity firms. Firms that led or co-led from outside of Europe included a mix of venture or private equity firms from the U.S. or Asia. Above pre-COVID funding Funding in Europe did not grow significantly year over year in 2025, but was well above pre-COVID funding levels and growing in deep tech and AI. With a renewed focus on science, funding has also shifted toward cities across Europe with leading research institutes. Methodology The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data is as of Jan. 4, 2026. Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year. Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price. Glossary of funding terms Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less. Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million. Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round. Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.) Illustration: Dom Guzman
Humans& Raises Huge $480M Seed Round At $4.48B Valuation For ‘Human-Centric AI Lab’
Humans&, a new company founded by top researchers from Google, Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI and Meta, among others, announced Tuesday that it has raised a massive $480 million seed round at a staggering $4.48 billion valuation. So far, not much is known about the company, founded in September 2025, which says its mission is to design an AI tool “around how people connect and work together, where collaboration and human insight remain central.” humans& co-founders from left: Noah Goodman, Andi Peng, Georges Harik, Yuchen He and Eric Zelikman. [Courtesy photo] SV Angel 1 and co-founder Harik also led the round, which included participation from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, GV (Google Ventures), Emerson Collective, Forerunner, S32, DCVC, Human Capital, Felicis 2 and CRV, among “many others,” according to the company. The seed round was raised all cash unstructured. The startup says its AI lab aims to set “the standard for how AI supports human connection.” Its tool, it adds, will act as a connective tissue to facilitate collaboration between people and intelligent systems. In a blog post, the company wrote: “No one changes the world alone. AI models are rapidly learning to reason better, code faster, and take actions in the world with increasing autonomy. But for humans, progress happens when we understand one another, build trust, make connections, and work together. That is where we believe the next chapter of AI should begin.” Peng told Crunchbase News via email that humans& will spend the majority of the capital on compute for training models. Huge seed rounds for AI While huge funding rounds are not unusual in the artificial intelligence space, the Humans& raise is believed to be one of the largest seed rounds ever raised. The largest, however, was raised by Thinking Machines Lab last year. Launched and led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and joined by AI heavy hitters from Meta, OpenAI, Google and Mistral AI, the San Francisco-based company last year announced a $2 billion Andreessen Horowitz-led financing at a $10 billion valuation. It was by far the largest seed round in the Crunchbase dataset. Crunchbase data showed that seed investors poured money into AI startups in 2025 at an even more exuberant pace than in 2024, which was already record-setting. More than 41% of the $38.4 billion invested in global seed funding in 2025 went to companies in AI-focused industry categories, per Crunchbase data. That was up from 30% in 2024. The numbers also got bigger. Just over $15 billion had gone to AI-focused seed rounds as of Dec. 12, per Crunchbase, up about 50% from 2024. Below, we take a look at AI investment total and share for the past six years. It was also a record-setting year for really, really huge seed rounds. By this, we mean financings of $100 million or more — once unheard of, but now not that uncommon. We kept the dataset of these deals to U.S. startups for simpler vetting. But even with this limit, the total was enormous — topping $3.6 billion in 2025, as of Dec. 12, a new record. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Fintech Forecast: Momentum Builds With Big Deals, IPO-Ready Companies And More AI
Global venture funding to fintech and financial services startups last year rose 27% to total $51.8 billion, again topping pre-pandemic levels, per Crunchbase data, despite fewer funding deals. On the heels of that momentum, investors in the space say they expect funding growth in 2026 to continue to concentrate into pre-IPO companies, for M&A to tick up, and to see robust investment into startups that add value to their fintech offerings with AI. IPO momentum The IPO dam finally seems to have broken in 2025, with several companies in the fintech space either going public or filing to do so last year. That could work in the funding environment’s favor going forward, since startup investment often follows the lead of public-market counterparts. However, despite impressive debuts, shares have settled for many of the fintech companies that went public in 2025. Stablecoin issuer Circle, digital bank Chime, buy now, pay later plan provider Klarna, and enterprise expense management platform Navan are now all trading near or below their first-day closing prices. Still, investors are eager to back pre-IPO companies such as Plaid, Ramp, Monzo or Revolut, according to Nik Milanovic, general partner of The Fintech Fund. “The story of fintech funding this year will probably be dominated by those $100M+ rounds as these companies get ready to go public,” he told Crunchbase News. At the same time, he also predicts that “M&A will go crazy” in 2026 and that more companies will follow the lead set by Stripe and Revolut in providing tender offers to their employees in order to defer the decision to go public. “Venture firms will both sell and buy into these rounds,” he said. The AI effect The AI conversation has shifted the VC mindset into bubble territory from a valuation perspective, yet the underlying growth and performance of companies in the age of AI is “astounding and unlike anything we’ve seen before,” even relative to 2020 and 2021, according to Amias Gerety, partner and head of U.S. investments at QED Investors. “Absent a broader recession, we expect some pullback and return to rationality in the funding market,” he said, “but we believe funding in fintech and at the AI application layer should remain quite strong.” Still, “we just don’t expect fintech funding to ever recover to the highs we saw in 2020 and 2021, when fintech and crypto were the hottest themes in venture,” Gerety said. “The tourists have moved on to chasing the AI-hype cycle.” Jake Gibson of Better Tomorrow Ventures believes we’ll continue to see more AI companies across the fintech spectrum and that in general “there’s a lot of innovation going on in fintech right now.” “The current administration has been much more friendly to fintech innovation, so we expect that in 2026 we’ll see more fintechs getting bank charters and vertically integrating,” he said. “We’ll see more activity around stablecoins and crypto … and a lot of new products in the wealth stack.” Who’s getting funding Overall, “the best teams will increasingly pull ahead,” especially as startups building in AI and stablecoins scale faster than prior generations of fintech companies, according to Jordan Leites, vice president at Norwest. “These businesses can move more quickly and reach meaningful adoption earlier in their lifecycles,” he wrote in an email interview. Looking ahead, he expects stablecoins, agentic payments, and AI-native tools for financial services to command a disproportionate share of funding. “These categories sit at the intersection of technological inflection points and clear customer demand,” he said, “which is where capital tends to follow.” Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman