battle: SF vs NYC vs LA vs Boston

Happy Tuesday Brex Community,

Tech Weeks have arrived! Boston is taking place this week and NY is taking the following week. We have several events during these weeks, see event section below for details. Given the tech weeks , I was curious how the four largest early stage startup scenes stack up at the early stage in terms of number of deals, specifically at seed and series A. Not surprising Bay Area continues to dominate and has more deals occurring than NY metro, LA metro and Boston metro combined!

I’m based in NYC, so long term bullish on what’s happening on the ground here especially around vertical AI applications specifically in enterprise, fintech, and healthcare. Interesting fact, there are 3x+ more sales professionals in NYC than SF, so if you need to sell software/AI, NYC is THE place to do that and customer obsessed founders see the value of being on the ground here.

Have a great week!

Shai Goldman

Events you might see us at - subscribe here - all focused on Foudners, VCs & Finance leaders:

May 26 - SF - Giants game with Stifel and Brex - At Capacity

May 27 - Boston - Tech Week event with the Celtics finance team - Apply Here

May 28 - SF - Go Kart Racing for Founders - At Capacity

June 2 - NYC - Coworking during Tech Week - Apply Here

June 5 - NYC - Shabbat Dinner during Tech Week - Apply Here

June 11 - SF - Chocolate truffle making classes - At Capacity

June 12 - SF - ⚽️ watch party - US vs Paraguay - Apply Here

June 12 - NYC - ⚽️ watch party - US vs Paraguay - Apply Here

June 18 - SF - Brex Flex Club - Padel - Apply Here

June 25 - NYC - Brex Flex Club - Puppy Yoga - Apply Here

Aug 18 - Chicago - Brex Mode - for finance leaders - Apply Here

Aug 25 - Austin - Brex Mode - for finance leaders - Apply Here

Recurring - NYC - Founder workout sessions - Apply Here

Convective Capital, an early-stage venture fund led by WePay cofounder Bill Clerico, has announced the closing of its $85 million Fund II. While the firm's initial $35 million debut fund (raised in 2022) focused heavily on wildfire technology, this new fund expands its mandate to broader disaster resilience.

Key Highlights:

• The Investment Thesis: Clerico believes that worsening natural disasters are creating massive economic dislocations—such as utilities facing bankruptcy and insurance companies pulling out of high-risk markets. This instability opens up significant market opportunities for innovative startups to step in and provide solutions.

• Shift in Investors: The first fund was backed largely by individual investors, but Fund II has attracted mostly institutional backers, including asset managers and insurance companies who are acutely aware of climate risks.

• Fund II's Early Investments: The new fund has already begun backing startups, including an AI-powered home design firm, a timber mill company, a Y Combinator-backed drone startup focused on inspecting power lines, and a commodity price hedging insurance product.

• Track Record: The firm's first portfolio has been highly successful so far. Those early companies have collectively generated over $100 million in revenue, reached a combined valuation of $2 billion, and seen a 79% success rate of seed-stage companies advancing to Series A funding.

Leadbay qualifies the millions of digitally scarce leads that couldn't be found before. 40% of US GDP comes from small and medium-sized businesses - a market that signal-based tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, and Clay largely overlook.

Today, enterprises like Deel, Brex, Corgi, and Gerflor USA use Leadbay to unlock 3x the addressable market they thought they had - and 10x the qualified leads their reps can actually work. Less list-building, more closing.

Backed by YC F25 with a $4.3M seed. Built between Paris and SF by Ludovic Granger (CEO, 3 years investing in 30 US tech startups/year) and Milan Stankovic (CTO, PhD in AI on limited data).

Problem

40% of US GDP is invisible to your sales stack. Apollo, ZoomInfo, Sales Nav only cover the top 10% - the companies with clean digital footprints and LinkedIn-active employees. Everyone else is impossible to find at scale. US sales reps burn 60% of their week doing manual research and still miss most of their TAM.

Solution

Leadbay's AI agents discover and qualify SMBs from sparse, fragmented, real-world data — the kind of signal traditional tools throw away. Human-like qualification, in minutes, not weeks. A rep tells the agent who they're looking for; minutes later they get a qualified list with company context, contact enrichment, and outreach prep. Managers get the territory view: pipeline health, rep coverage, where the next deal is hiding.

Why now

Two things just became possible at the same time. LLMs can finally reason over messy, incomplete SMB data the way an experienced rep does - the AI maturity gap that kept these markets invisible just closed. Meanwhile US sales orgs are under pressure to do more with leaner teams; the manual prospecting model is breaking. The teams that win the next decade will be the ones who can reach the 90% of the market their competitors literally can't see.

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Brex is the intelligent finance platform built for speed and control. Combining corporate cards, banking, treasury, expense management, bill pay, travel, and accounting, Brex helps companies spend smarter and move faster in 120 countries. By integrating AI across every workflow, Brex enables founders and finance teams to eliminate manual work, do more with less, and accelerate impact. More than 35,000 companies from startups to enterprises run on Brex, including Anthropic, Cursor, ServiceTitan, Robinhood, DoorDash, and Sonos