Brex adds managed travel powered by Spotnana

Financial services and technology company Brex is expanding its spend management platform, Brex Empower, by adding corporate travel management powered by Spotnana.

The offering includes comprehensive booking and management, in both the Brex dashboard and mobile app, with global inventory, self-service trip changes and round-the-clock support from agents.

Founded in 2017, Brex launched the Empower software platform in April 2022 starting with spend management but saying at the time that Empower would “serve as the foundation for all Brex products moving forward.”

Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras says the company has been working with Spotnana for about a year, building the integration and enabling travel services for Empower customers such as GoGuardian, Miso Robotics and Satellite Healthcare.

An earlier iteration of Brex Travel launched in 2018 in partnership with TravelBank with a focus on travel rewards. Dubugras says the company is still using TravelBank for the rewards redemption service but “Spotnana is the main travel partner.”

The new system, built on top of Spotnana’s cloud-based infrastructure, provides automatic approvals for expenses that are within policy, streamlining the process for both employees who are traveling and for travel managers and ultimately driving more adoption.

“Most employees find it hard to comply because they don’t know what the policy is, and it takes a lot of effort to collect receipts and memos for every purchase,” Dubugras says.

“With Brex Travel you can easily see the right policy on the mobile app at the time of booking, and we automate receipt collection, memos and approvals on trips. … When that is so easy, employees participate more because it saves them time.”

Dubugras also says the real-time budgeting tool helps travel managers become more thoughtful about which trips are necessary, which over time can bring costs down. And he says, because Spotnana does not take commissions from the global distribution systems, Brex Travel is able to provide comprehensive, unbiased inventory.

“Brex is an innovator that shares our passion for delivering superior customer experiences,” says Sarosh Waghmar, founder and CEO of Spotnana. 

“We are excited to partner with Brex and provide the core travel infrastructure that enables them to expand the Empower platform and create an end-to-end travel and expense solution.”

Dubugras says Brex Travel is currently suited for companies with 200 to 10,000 employees, but the company wants to grow its customer base to larger enterprises in the future.