Henrique Dubugras is a Brazilian entrepreneur who founded his first business by the age of 14. The problem he aimed to solve was the lack of information Brazilian students have about the application process for American schools. Henrique discovered a passion for technology, specifically coding, and incorporated both his passion and the problem he identified into a business. The company became extremely successful as it garnered over 800,000 users but Henrique failed to make a profit and eventually had to shut it down. But this didn’t stop him from continuing to identify problems and attempting to find innovative solutions for them.
A few years went on and Henrique met an individual named Pedro Franceschi. Pedro also had a passion for technology and after discussing with one another they decided to make a visit to Silicon Valley as well as attend Stanford University. Pedro also had a background for entrepreneurship and was eager to find ways to utilize technology in order to solve specific problems. Eventually, Pedro and Henrique discovered a mutual issue they encountered when they were trying to build businesses; the lack of access to credit that founders have. As Henrique said, “There aren’t a lot of venture capitals in Brazil that are willing to fund 15-year-olds.” And once they realized they could provide a solution to this problem, they dropped out of Stanford and began working full-time on their new business, Brex. As stated from the two founders, “Brex doesn’t require any kind of personal guarantee or security deposit and it doesn’t use third-party legacy technology; its software platform is built from scratch. It simplifies a lot of the frustrating parts of corporate expenses by providing companies with a consolidated look at their spending. At the end of each month, for example, a CEO can easily see how much the entire company spent on Uber. Plus, Brex can give entrepreneurs a credit limit that’s as much as 10 times higher than what they’d receive elsewhere and they can issue cards, virtual cards at least, moments after the online application is complete.”
Henrique and Pedro were able to discover a problem and use their passion and expertise to find a solution. Today Brex is a billion-dollar publicly traded business only after being founded in 2017.
I find it quite interesting that someone hadn’t already made this sort of a platform. However this certainly would be more than helpful for executive or small business owners. It’s also crazy that he built over a billion dollar company is such a short period of time.