Pedro Franceschi

Pedro Franceschi is a software engineer, entrepreneur, and the founder of the companies Brex and Pagar.me.

Franceschi grew up in Brazil. From a young age, Franceschi showed an interest in technology and computers. When he was between eight and nine years old, he taught himself how to code using information from Google and tech books and used this knowledge to jailbreak iPhones to work in his region in Brazil. When Franceschi was fourteen, he developed an iPad window management software that enabled users to simultaneously manage multiple applications. His software exploits gained some notoriety in Brazil, which helped him to get software engineering jobs while in high school. He worked at Brainjuice from 2009 to early 2010; Sync Mobile from 2010 to 2011; and M4U (later acquired by Bemobi) from 2011 to 2013. Also while in high school, he befriended Henrique Dubugras over Twitter, where the two "fought" over which coding software was best. They quickly became fellow business partners and decided to found their first company together.

Franceschi and Dubugras founded Pagar.me together in 2013 when they were both just sixteen years old. Pagar.me is a developer-friendly online payment processor for use in Brazil. By the time Franceschi and Dubugras sold the company in 2016, Pagar.me had amassed over one hundred employees. The company was purchased by StoneCo in 2016 for "tens of millions of dollars."

In 2016, Franceschi was accepted into Stanford University in the United States, as was Dubugras. They attended Stanford together for less than one year before dropping out to pursue their next business venture. At first, they pursued the idea of a virtual reality startup, but they quickly quit after realizing they didn't know enough about that market and pivoted back to the idea of payment processors, which is when they started forming the idea for Brex.

Brex was founded in January 2017 by Franceschi and Dubugras. The business first operated out of a house, but soon opened its first office in San Francisco. Brex issues corporate credit cards to startup businesses. It is different than most other corporate cards and sets credit limits as a percentage (typically 10 percent) of the amount of money a startup has available in its bank account at any given time, rather than basing it on a founder's credit history or the company's anticipated profits. Brex cards must be paid in full each month. To be approved for a card, startups must have received at least $100,000 in professional investments. The company has been financially backed by PayPal.