Flex hits $1.2B valuation on $70M round led by Halo Fund

Six months is the number worth pausing on. That is how long it took Flex, an AI-native banking startup for mid-sized business owners, to roughly double its private valuation. Reuters reported that Flex has raised a $70 million Series B1 led by Halo Fund, the venture firm co-founded by Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith and Accel partner Ryan Sweeney, at around a $1.2 billion valuation, more than double its mark six months ago. The specifics come via a source rather than a company disclosure, which is worth flagging up front.

What Flex is selling is a private-bank experience for the middle of the American economy. CEO Zaid Rahman's framing, per Reuters, is that there are maybe 350,000 to 400,000 U.S. business owners running companies that manage 40% of America's payroll, and they sit awkwardly between consumer fintech and regional banks. The product bundles credit, treasury and cross-border payments with AI agents, including one called Beacon AI that gives owners a weekly read on their business finances. Rahman told Reuters the company is growing roughly four-fold year over year at a nine-figure annualized revenue run rate, with a few thousand customers onboarded and plans to more than double headcount from 110 to over 200 by year-end.

The more interesting number sits inside Flex Global, the cross-border product. Forbes reports that stablecoin volume through Flex already exceeds $1 billion annually, a fast-growing slice of about $10 billion in annualized payment volume overall, moving across more than 100 countries in 32 currencies. If you were skeptical that stablecoins had a serious B2B use case beyond crypto-native firms, this is one of the cleaner data points to argue with.

The honest caveats are stacked. The valuation and revenue figures are single-sourced. Flex's core customers, per Forbes, generate between $3 million and $200 million in annual revenue and are concentrated in construction, wholesale and import-export, which are exactly the segments most exposed to a tariff or trade shock. The reporting also does not disclose how the $300 million debt facility that backs the credit book is structured, or what credit losses look like, which is the number that eventually decides whether an AI-native private bank clears a full cycle.

What is worth watching is the pressure this puts on the middle. Regional banks own this customer today largely by default, not by product. If a well-funded competitor can close treasury, credit and FX in a single login and price cross-border transfers like a stablecoin wallet, the sticky parts of those bank relationships are exactly what starts to move.