Flex, the San Francisco-based AI fintech startup, has roughly doubled its valuation to approximately $1.2 billion following a $60 million Series B funding round. That’s up from around $500 million earlier in the year.
The round, led by Portage Ventures, brings Flex’s total equity raised to $105 million. The company also previously secured a $200 million credit facility.
The mid-market gap Flex is targeting
Flex is building for mid-sized businesses in the US pulling in between $2 million and $100 million in annual revenue. The platform combines payments, private credit, business finance, and personal finance tools into a single AI-driven ecosystem.
The operational numbers heading into the Series B tell the story. Flex reported a 4x increase in revenue over the year leading up to the funding round. Its private credit offerings tripled over the same period.
Zaid Rahman, the founder and CEO, has been building Flex since at least 2022. The company’s pitch is straightforward: profitable mid-sized businesses deserve the same caliber of financial infrastructure that enterprises take for granted.
Why this matters beyond traditional fintech
The private credit angle is particularly relevant. Tokenized private credit has become one of the fastest-growing sectors in DeFi, with protocols like Maple Finance, Centrifuge, and Goldfinch building on-chain versions of exactly the kind of lending Flex does off-chain. When a traditional fintech triples its private credit book in a single year, it validates the thesis that institutional demand for alternative lending products is real and growing.
Mid-2024 secondary-market data showed Flex valuations reaching as high as $1.41 billion before settling back. The fact that the Series B priced at $1.2 billion, below some secondary peaks, hints that the round may have been structured conservatively, giving new investors a reasonable entry point rather than chasing peak valuations.
What this means for investors
Flex is still a private company, so there’s no direct way to trade its equity on public markets.
Crypto protocols operating in adjacent spaces should take note. Tokenized private credit platforms are essentially competing for the same underlying demand: mid-market businesses that need flexible financing and are underserved by banks.
With $105 million in equity and a $200 million credit facility, Flex has the resources to expand aggressively into new product categories and geographies. Any crypto lending protocol targeting US mid-market borrowers will increasingly find itself benchmarked against well-capitalized traditional fintech competitors like Flex.
Private credit is also cyclically sensitive. If the US economy slows meaningfully, mid-market borrowers are often the first to feel the squeeze, and lenders to that segment, whether on-chain or off, will need robust underwriting to avoid losses.