Brex Launches AI Native Accounting API for ERP Automation
Brex launches AI native accounting technology designed to automate corporate financial workflows, the latest salvo in an intensifying battle with rival Ramp for enterprise market share. The San Francisco-based fintech unveiled its Accounting API on Tuesday, enabling real-time bidirectional data synchronization between its platform and enterprise resource planning systems. The move positions the $12.3 billion company to compete more directly with Ramp, which reached a $32 billion valuation in November 2025 and now serves over 50,000 customers with $1 billion in annualized revenue.
The new product moves beyond conventional one-way bank feeds that have characterized corporate financial software for decades. According to Chief Technology Officer James Reggio, the initiative addresses persistent pain points around delays, missing context, and error-prone manual reconciliation that plague month-end close processes. Brex launches AI powered automations that have already eliminated more than 10,000 hours of manual work for customers in initial deployment months, the company disclosed. The automation suite includes machine learning-driven expense coding that continuously learns optimal field values and suggests coding rules, plus ERP validation capabilities that ensure expenses comply with system constraints from the outset.
Customers accept over 90% of AI-generated suggestions, with more than 65% of all expenses on the platform now fully automated, Brex reported. The company says customers save an average of 312 hours annually on accounting and compliance tasks, with AI acceleration reducing month-end close times by three times. The timing addresses growing enterprise demand for what industry participants call “zero-day close” capabilities, where financial books remain perpetually audit-ready rather than requiring intensive period-end scrambles.
The strategic launch arrives as Brex pursues aggressive expansion into enterprise accounts following its controversial 2022 decision to exit the small and medium-sized business market. The company now serves more than 35,000 customers globally, including over 150 publicly traded companies such as Anthropic, Arm, Robinhood, ServiceTitan, and Sonos. Internal figures show enterprise business revenue grew 80% year-over-year through 2025, driving total company revenue toward an expected $500 million annualized run rate, up from approximately $370 million in 2024.
Brex faces formidable competition from Ramp, which has captured significant market share through aggressive pricing and rapid product expansion. Ramp doubled its customer count to more than 50,000 over the past year while revenue surged past $1 billion, up from roughly $500 million twelve months earlier. The company’s enterprise customer base more than doubled year-over-year to 2,200 accounts, including CBRE, Shopify, Anduril, Figma, and Notion. Ramp processes over $100 billion in annual purchase volume and has raised $2.3 billion in total equity financing since its 2019 founding, giving it substantial capital reserves to fund customer acquisition and product development.
The Accounting API initially launches with integrations to Rillet and Campfire, two AI-focused ERP platforms targeting customers who prioritize automation capabilities. Nicolas Kopp, founder and chief executive of Rillet, characterized the manual month-end close as “a relic,” arguing that pairing real-time transaction data from Brex with automated reconciliation engines enables ledgers to remain perpetually current across prepaids, accruals, and multi-entity consolidations. The partnership strategy gives Brex immediate access to companies already committed to automation-first finance infrastructure, potentially accelerating adoption compared to traditional enterprise software sales cycles.
The technical architecture centers on continuous data synchronization rather than batch processing. Key accounting fields flow from ERP systems into Brex so spending policies incorporate business context at the point of transaction, while real-time webhooks and expanded API endpoints notify accounting systems the moment transactions occur. Brex launches AI to accomplish tight coupling with broader accounting workflows, allowing finance teams to automate what the company describes as the full journey “from swipe to close.” This approach challenges legacy assumptions that accounting necessarily involves discrete period-end reconciliations rather than real-time bookkeeping.
The competitive landscape has grown increasingly crowded. The global business-to-business payments market totaled approximately $149 trillion in 2022, yet corporate card adoption remained stubbornly low at roughly 4% of total B2B transactions. This massive addressable market has attracted numerous well-funded competitors, including vertical software providers building integrated payment capabilities for specific industries like ecommerce, trucking, and construction. Both companies demonstrate high product velocity with continuous feature releases, reflecting the rapid innovation pace required to maintain competitive advantage in corporate spend management.
Brex’s revenue model relies primarily on interchange fees when customers use Brex cards for transactions, with the company collecting approximately 2.7% on transaction volume as gross revenue before splitting interchange with card networks, resulting in roughly 65% gross margins. Additional revenue streams include seat-based fees for financial management software through Brex Essentials and Brex Premium tiers, fees from banking partners where customer cash deposits generate interest, and transaction revenue from bill payment products. The Premium tier, priced at $12 per user monthly, offers features like dynamic approval chains, AI-powered compliance audits, live budgets, and group travel policies that appeal to larger enterprise customers.
Brex’s horizontal expansion strategy attempts to capture larger shares of customers’ financial technology stacks by bundling capabilities that would otherwise require separate subscriptions to companies like Bill.com for bill pay, Navan for travel management, and Mercury for banking services. However, Ramp pursues an identical strategy with its integrated finance platform covering expense management, bill payments, procurement, travel, and analytics. Both companies compete for the same enterprise customers while facing pressure from established financial institutions increasingly building or acquiring similar capabilities.
Regulatory scrutiny presents persistent challenges as financial technology integration with traditional banking systems continues accelerating. The company must navigate evolving compliance frameworks while maintaining the rapid innovation pace that venture-backed competitors demand. Any significant compliance issues could damage reputation and operations in an industry where trust and regulatory standing constitute critical competitive advantages. Meanwhile, customer acquisition costs likely increase as Brex and Ramp compete for the same enterprise accounts, potentially compressing margins even as revenue scales.
The announcement reflects broader trends reshaping corporate finance departments as artificial intelligence capabilities mature beyond experimental pilots into production workflows handling mission-critical accounting functions. Finance leaders increasingly expect software platforms to eliminate routine manual tasks entirely rather than merely digitizing existing paper-based processes. This shift creates opportunities for companies that successfully embed AI throughout their technology stacks while threatening those that treat automation as an optional feature. Brex launches AI native design as a core differentiator, though Ramp’s AI agents already make over 26 million decisions monthly across more than $10 billion in spending.
Success with the Accounting API will depend on execution across several critical dimensions. Brex must rapidly expand ERP integrations beyond initial partners Rillet and Campfire to match the breadth competitors offer. The AI-driven coding suggestions must maintain accuracy and reliability as customer volumes scale, particularly for complex enterprise accounting requirements. The company needs to support increasingly sophisticated enterprise needs without sacrificing the user experience simplicity that attracted early-stage startup customers. Most importantly, Brex must demonstrate that its automation delivers measurable return on investment that justifies switching costs for enterprises already embedded with competitors.
The market opportunity appears substantial for platforms that genuinely eliminate manual accounting work, particularly as finance departments confront persistent labor shortages and rising expectations for real-time visibility into spending and cash positions. However, competitive dynamics ensure that capturing meaningful market share will require sustained innovation and flawless execution. Ramp’s $32 billion valuation, more than double Brex’s $12.3 billion, reflects investor confidence in its ability to dominate the corporate spend management category. Whether Brex can successfully challenge that dominance through AI-native accounting automation remains an open question as both companies race to define the future of enterprise financial operations.
