• Business banking platform Flex raised $70 million in a Series B1 round to expand its business finance, payments, private credit, and ERP offerings while doubling its workforce.
• The company also launched Flex Global, a cross-border banking service that combines multi-currency accounts, global payments, and stablecoin infrastructure to enable faster international money movement.
• With Flex Global, Flex is positioning itself to compete more directly with Brex and Ramp by offering globally active businesses a unified platform that blends banking, payments, credit, and wealth management.

The business banking space is heating up again. Business banking platform Flex landed $70 million in a Series B1 investment, boosting its total equity funding to $180 million and total debt funding to $300 million.

Halo Fund lead the investment, which comes seven months after Flex’s $60 million Series B round. Portage Ventures, Wellington, Crosslink Capital, 53 Stations, Titanium Ventures, Spice, Florida Funders, Spice, and others also contributed. Halo’s participation is especially notable, as its co-founders span the sports and entertainment space, bringing expertise in sports and entertainment distribution into audiences that include millions of successful middle-market business owners and entrepreneurs.

With this round, Flex plans to expand across business finance, personal finance, payments, private credit, and ERP. The company will also use the funds to double the team size from 110 employees to more than 200 by year-end.

Flex made its debut in 2022 to bring private banking to high net worth business owners. The California-based company offers banking, private credit, payments, billing, and accounting tools for businesses, as well as a business credit card that pays up to 5% cashback. The company’s average customer uses four or more of these products on its platform. Flex has crossed $10 billion in annualized total payment volume and is currently growing 4x year-over-year.

“I’ve spent my career helping entrepreneurs win, and they all have the same problem: their business and personal financial lives are completely intertwined, but every bank treats them as two different customers, missing what they’re actually trying to build,” said Halo Fund Owner Co-founder Ryan Smith. “Flex is the first team creating a real private bank around the owner and the entire household’s finances, and the gap they’re filling is just as real globally as it is in the US. Zaid and the team have built an enduring business that is becoming an institution for the world’s most ambitious owners.”

Along with today’s funding announcement, Flex is launching Flex Global, a service that brings together local currency accounts, cross-border payments, and stablecoins for always-on, fast funds transfers. The service is aimed to serve cross-border businesses by issuing global credit cards, leveraging stablecoin payment rails and wallets in 100+ countries, and offering institutional USD accounts for foreign business owners. Flex’s multi-currency accounts support 32 currencies across 76 countries, enabling busineses to hold, send, and receive funds in the currencies they actually operate in.

Flex’s goal is to make the underlying payment rails invisible to customers by embedding stablecoin settlement into its private banking experience. Rather than requiring businesses to manage crypto wallets or navigate blockchain technology, Flex uses stablecoins behind the scenes to make international payments feel as seamless as domestic ones.

“Middle-market business owners are one of the most important and underserved customers in finance globally,” said Flex CEO and Founder Zaid Rahman. “Depending on the type of owner, they’ll tell you their vendors are spread across the US, Poland, Brazil, etc; their accounts hold currency outside of just USD; and they have to oscillate across 2-3 vendors and layers of fees just to do business outside their country.”

Flex Global raises the competitive stakes for Brex and Ramp by expanding Flex beyond domestic banking, credit, and expense management into global financial infrastructure. Both rivals already support international cards and vendor payments, while Brex has also been developing stablecoin-based global transfers. Flex differentiates itself with its focus on middle-market business owners and its effort to combine cross-border payments, multi-currency accounts, credit, banking, and personal wealth management within a single private-banking relationship. That approach could help Flex compete less as another spend-management platform and more as the primary financial institution for globally active entrepreneurs.

• Reset raised $6 million in seed funding from credit union customers and partners to expand its embedded earned wage access platform for credit unions and community banks.
• The company positions earned wage access as a tool to deepen relationships and grow deposits, reporting that cardholders increase deposits by 27%, maintain 36% higher balances, and generate 20% more interchange revenue.
• Credit unions increasingly view earned wage access as competitive infrastructure to defend primary financial relationships against digital banks and neobanks.

Embedded earned wage access platform Reset unveiled today that it has raised $6 million in seed funding. The investment, which comes from credit union customers and strategic partners in the credit union and community banking space, boosts Reset’s total funding to more than $8 million.

Reset will use the funds to expand its sales and implementation capacity, deepen product development, and accelerate existing deployments.

California-based Reset, which aims to serve credit unions and community banks, embeds its technology directly into financial institutions’ existing technology stacks to enable members to access their earned wages on a daily basis, fee-free, via a card issued by the credit union or community bank.

“When your customers lead your funding round, there is no clearer market signal,” said Reset CEO and Co-founder Matt Dicou. “These credit unions aren’t just writing a check. They’re making a decision about where they want to take their members, their institutions, and the credit union industry. They see that Chime and other neobanks are successfully recruiting people away from credit unions today. Our credit union partners already have trusted member relationships. We give them what they need to remain the primary financial home.”

Reset anticipates that the earned wage card will help financial institutions grow direct deposits, since the more a member deposits, the more real-time funds they can access. The company said that cardholders increase deposits held at their credit union by 27% and maintain checking account balances 36% higher than before switching cards.

In addition to the earned wage feature, Reset also helps credit unions generate credit interchange revenue on cardholder’s everyday spend. The company said that its cardholders generate 20% more in credit interchange revenue for their institution.

“When a credit union invests in a fintech, it sends a message: we believe in this enough to put our name on it. Reset is solving a real problem for working members, and it’s doing it in a way that makes the credit union stronger in the process,” said Stephanie Curtis, Chief Member Experience Officer at VyStar Credit Union.

Rather than viewing earned wage access as simply another product offering, many credit unions increasingly see these tools as infrastructure to defend primary financial relationships, capture direct deposits, and compete against digital banks. As neobanks continue using faster access to money as a customer acquisition tool, features like earned wage access may become table stakes rather than differentiators.

Georgia’s Own Credit Union’s investment in Reset highlights this shift from product experimentation toward competitive infrastructure. “Our members are already looking for this, and until now, they’ve had to turn to other options,” said Georgia’s Own Credit Union CTO Kevan Williamson. “Reset levels the playing field for our members. We invested because we’ve seen what it does for members’ financial stability, and because we believe credit unions should be the ones offering it.”

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

• Ramp raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation as it expands beyond corporate cards and expense management.
• The company is betting AI token spend will become a major business cost category requiring new financial infrastructure.
• Ramp launched Stack, an AI-native accounting platform, as it pushes deeper into automation, accounting, and enterprise finance.

Corporate card and expense management platform Ramp is on a roll this week. In addition to launching Stack, an AI-native platform for accountants, the New York-based company also raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation.

The $750 million boosts the company’s total funds to $3.75 billion, following its most recent raise of $300 million in November of last year. Investors in this week’s round include new contributors Goldman Sachs Alternatives, D.E. Shaw & Co., Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Generation Investment Management, Insight Partners, and BroadLight Capital, as well as previous investors Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, D1 Capital Partners, T. Rowe Price, General Catalyst, Alpha Wave Global, 137 Ventures, Thrive Capital, Coatue, Sands Capital, Khosla Ventures, 1789 Capital, Avenir Growth, BoxGroup, 8VC, Pinegrove Venture Partners, Definition Capital, and Stripes.

The investment comes as Ramp positions itself as financial infrastructure for AI spending by expanding into managing one of the fastest-growing costs in business: tokens.

“For 500 years, business ran on two pillars of spend: people and vendors. In the last 24 months, a third arrived—intelligence, paid by the token and invisible to every system we’ve built to manage cost. Ramp is the infrastructure for the third pillar,” said Ramp Co-Founder and CEO Eric Glyman.

As businesses embed AI into workflows, employees and agents are generating growing volumes of token-based costs across models, copilots, and automated workflows. Ramp is betting companies will increasingly need tools to monitor, control, and optimize those costs just as they do traditional employee and vendor spending.

The round also comes days after Ramp launched Stack, a tool that allows customers to use agents to do reconciliations, update schedules, post journal entries, and create flux analyses. This creates value for accountants, as it has pre-built integrations that connect to every system their clients use, offers a full audit trail on every action, and provides an underlying model that handles a wide range of accounting tasks.

Some analysts claim that Ramp is overvalued at $44 billion, as it well exceeds competitor Brex’s valuation of $5.15 billion when it was acquired by Capital One earlier this year. It also exceeds PayPal’s valuation of nearly $38 billion.

However, Ramp is defending its value based on its past platform growth and current trajectory. In the past few months alone, Ramp has launched more than 70 products and major features. In addition to token spend management and Stack, the company released budget tools, procurement agents, accounting agents, and customized tools for startups. Also, Ramp closed two acquisitions and announced geographical expansions into the UK and Europe.

“We’re growing as fast as we were three years ago, at roughly twenty times the size,” said Glyman. “And that’s because finance is going through the biggest structural change since the spreadsheet. Every company needs infrastructure to navigate an AI economy, from a CFO in London to an accounting firm in Wichita. While we’re growing fast, we still only serve a fraction of the market. There’s a lot more work to do.”

Whether Ramp’s valuation proves justified remains to be seen. But the company’s recent product launches and messaging suggest it is attempting something larger than expense management. Rather than positioning itself as a corporate card company, Ramp is betting that businesses entering an AI economy will need new financial infrastructure to manage not only employees and vendors, but also increasingly autonomous systems and the costs they generate.

• Gradient Labs raised $26 million in Series A funding to expand its vertical AI platform, bringing its total funding to $42.6 million.
• The company will use the funds to build autonomous banking tools designed to help financial institutions automate customer operations.
• The funding shows that banks are shifting from using AI as a bolt-on solution toward using AI agents to autonomously execute operational tasks directly within financial systems.

Conversational AI platform Gradient Labs is on a mission to build AI agents that will help banks run on autopilot. The UK-based company has added $26 million to its Series A round, boosting its total funding to $42.6 million.

The investment was led by new investors Octopus Ventures and CommerzVentures, with additional backing from Redpoint Ventures and Exceptional Capital. Gradient Labs noted that the diverse group of investors is a strong validation for the company, which will use the funds to build autonomous banking tools that help banks deploy AI agents that reduce the time and resources they spend dealing with operational complexity.

Founded in 2023, Gradient Labs enables banks to embed AI agents directly into their systems to automate customer operations and complex workflows. By moving beyond rule-based automation, the company helps financial institutions reduce operational burden, improve customer experience, and prepare for an AI-first future. The company boosted its revenue by 900% last year, and currently counts 32 million end users after adding Current, Stash, and Rho to its existing client base that includes Wise, Zego, Monzo, Pockit, and others.

Gradient Labs is building on the concept of vertical AI, which is AI built specifically for one industry rather than for general-purpose. The company offers a Lending Agent that automates the borrower lifecycle, from a missed payment to outbound collections calls, to an agreed repayment plan; a Disputes Agent that handles everything from intake to chargeback; and a KYB Agent that runs identity and document checks.

The company argues that this domain specialization is what differentiates vertical AI from general-purpose AI tools. “Each agent includes the guardrails, compliance checks, and test scenarios for its domain, from FCA Consumer Duty to the EU AI Act,” said Gradient Labs CEO Dimitri Masin. “This is why so many organizations trust us to automate their long-running processes, and why we’re doubling down even further on domain-specific AI agents for financial services.”

Gradient Labs’ funding shows that banks are increasing their interest in deploying AI-powered solutions that are more integrated into their systems instead of just bolted on. Banks initially deployed AI to assist employees with customer service and internal workflows, but they are now increasingly exploring how AI can execute operational tasks autonomously.