Your investors expect you to maintain 24 to 30 months of runway, but your accounting system tells you where you stood six weeks ago. Brex and Puzzle fix this disconnect by working as a single system instead of disconnected tools. Brex extends credit based on startup metrics that matter, your team captures expenses at the transaction level, and Puzzle's AI categorizes everything automatically while updating your burn rate in real time. The result is financial visibility that matches the pace of your business, where you see the impact of hiring decisions and marketing spend this week instead of next month.
TLDR:
Venture capital changes everything about how you run your startup. The moment you close your seed or Series A round, you're playing a different game with different rules. Investors expect you to maintain 24 to 30 months of runway and hit growth rates between 20% and 30% annually. Miss those benchmarks and your next fundraising conversation gets harder.
The problem is that most founders find they're off track weeks after it matters. Traditional accounting operates on a monthly cycle. You close the books, get your financials, and by then you're looking at decisions you made 30 to 45 days ago. That delay can be fatal for a company burning $200K per month.
Funded startups need to know their burn rate daily, understand which expenses are trending up, and see how new hires or marketing spend impacts runway. This isn't about better spreadsheets or faster bookkeepers. You need financial infrastructure that updates as money moves.
Traditional banks won't extend credit to early-stage startups. They want personal guarantees, three years of revenue history, and collateral most founders don't have. Even if you just raised $5 million, getting a $50K credit line from Chase requires your personal credit score and often your home as collateral.
Brex built its underwriting model around the metrics that matter for venture-backed companies. They look at your cash balance, burn rate, and runway instead of your personal FICO score. If you have $2 million in the bank and reasonable burn, Brex can extend six-figure credit limits within days. One in three US startups used Brex as of 2024 because it's one of the few financial products designed for how startups work.
The value goes beyond the card itself. Brex combines corporate cards with expense management and bill pay in a single system. Your team submits receipts directly in Brex, approvals route automatically, and transactions sync to your accounting software the same day.
Most startups handle expenses the same painful way. Someone on your team buys something, screenshots a receipt, texts it to Slack, forgets about it for two weeks, then submits an expense report with half the details missing. Your finance person chases them down, matches receipts to card transactions manually, and spends hours each week reconciling everything.
The expense management software market is growing from $7.64 billion in 2024 to a projected $16.48 billion by 2032 because every company faces this bottleneck. Startups feel it harder because you can't hire someone just to manage expense reports, and you can't afford the time your team wastes on reimbursement paperwork.
Brex removes the bottleneck by capturing everything at the transaction level. Your team takes a photo of the receipt in the Brex app the moment they make a purchase. The system matches it to the card transaction automatically, enforces your spending policies in real time, and syncs the categorized expense to your books without manual data entry.
The hours you save add up fast. Instead of spending Friday afternoons reconciling expenses, your team focuses on shipping features and talking to customers.
You can have the best corporate card and the best accounting software, but if they don't talk to each other properly, you're still doing manual work. Most startups start with disconnected tools because they adopt what works at each stage. You get Mercury for banking, Brex for cards, Gusto for payroll, and QuickBooks because everyone said you needed it.
Then you start to see the integration tax. Brex transactions take days to sync to QuickBooks. When they finally arrive, categories are wrong or missing. Your bookkeeper spends hours each month fixing what should have been automatic. You're running reports in three different systems and building spreadsheets to see the full picture.
Data silos kill your velocity. When you need to understand your burn rate for a board meeting, you're exporting CSVs, cross-referencing transactions, and hoping your numbers match. The tools work individually, but the connective tissue breaks down.
Funded startups need their financial stack to function as a single system. When Brex syncs to Puzzle in real time with accurate categorization, you see how today's spending affects your runway today. That's the difference between reacting to last month's problems and preventing next month's mistakes.
Getting transactions into your accounting system is only half the battle. Someone still needs to categorize every Brex transaction, reconcile it against your bank statements, apply the right accounting treatment, and generate reports that actually tell you what's happening.
Most startups solve this by paying someone to do it manually. Your bookkeeper logs into QuickBooks, reviews hundreds of transactions, clicks through dropdown menus to assign categories, and fixes errors one by one. This process takes days each month, and by the time you get clean financials, the data is already stale.
AI changes the economics completely. Puzzle categorizes up to 98% of transactions automatically by learning from your patterns. When a Brex transaction for Google Ads hits your account, Puzzle recognizes it, categorizes it correctly, and reconciles it against your bank feed without human intervention.
The time savings matter, but the real value is continuous visibility. Your P&L updates as transactions happen instead of weeks later. You see how yesterday's spending affected your burn rate this morning, not next month.
Running out of money kills more startups than bad products or weak markets. You can recover from a failed launch or a competitor entering your space. You can't recover from zero dollars in the bank.
Burn rate is the only metric that matters when your runway drops below six months. Every hiring decision, every marketing campaign, and every software subscription either extends or shortens the time you have to hit your next milestone. Founders who track burn monthly make decisions on outdated information. By the time you realize you're burning $50K more per month than planned, you've already spent $150K you didn't have.
Real-time burn tracking changes how you operate. When Brex transactions sync to Puzzle daily, you see the impact of decisions immediately. That new engineering hire who started Monday already shows up in your burn calculation by Friday. Your AWS bill spiked 40% this week because of that product launch, and you know it now instead of at month-end.
The combination of Brex's spending controls and Puzzle's real-time accounting creates a feedback loop that keeps you alive longer. You set budgets in Brex, track actual spend against targets in Puzzle, and adjust before small problems become fatal ones.
Brex gives you spending control and transaction data. Puzzle turns that data into the financial intelligence you need to run your startup.
The integration works in real time. Every Brex transaction flows into Puzzle automatically, gets categorized by AI with up to 98% accuracy, and updates your financials immediately. No manual imports, no waiting for bank feeds to refresh, no bookkeeper spending hours matching transactions to receipts.
Puzzle maintains both cash and accrual books simultaneously from the same transaction stream. You see your actual cash position for daily decisions while keeping accrual financials ready for investors and tax filing. Most startups manage this with separate spreadsheets that break the moment your business gets complex.
The dashboard shows you what funded startups actually need to monitor: current burn rate, remaining runway, and cash on hand. These numbers update daily as Brex transactions sync, so you're making decisions based on today's reality instead of last month's history.
We built Puzzle to work with the tools startups already chose. If you're running on Brex, you get the full value of both without the integration tax.
Running out of cash kills more startups than bad products, and monthly financial reporting shows you problems too late to fix them. Brex and Puzzle together give you the real-time burn tracking and automated accounting that funded companies need to stay alive longer. Your transactions sync automatically, categorize with AI, and update your runway calculation daily. You make better decisions because you're working with today's data, not last month's history.
Brex underwrites based on startup-specific metrics like cash balance, burn rate, and runway instead of personal credit scores or collateral. If you have $2 million in the bank with reasonable burn, they can extend six-figure credit limits within days.
When your corporate card, bank, and accounting software don't sync properly, someone spends hours each month manually reconciling transactions, fixing incorrect categories, and building spreadsheets to see the full picture. Brex transactions can take days to sync to QuickBooks, and categories often arrive wrong or missing.
When you see burn rate and runway daily instead of weeks after month-end, you catch problems early enough to fix them. That new engineering hire's impact on your burn shows up within days, not 30-45 days later when you've already overspent.
Up to 98% automated categorization means your bookkeeper stops spending days clicking through dropdown menus and can focus on strategic work instead. More importantly, your financials update as transactions happen rather than weeks later, so you're making decisions on current data.
Yes, Puzzle maintains both simultaneously from the same Brex transaction stream. You see actual cash position for daily decisions while keeping accrual financials ready for investors and taxes, without managing separate systems that break as you scale.
