Flex, a San Francisco financial technology company, announced Tuesday a $70 million Series B1 led by Halo Fund, the billion-dollar venture firm Utah Jazz and Utah Mammoth owner Ryan Smith runs with Accel general partner Ryan Sweeney.
A person close to the deal told Reuters that the round values the three-year-old company at roughly $1.2 billion, more than double its December mark.
Flex Global, launched alongside the funding, settles cross-border payments on stablecoin rails in more than 100 countries and lets customers hold balances in 32 currencies. Flex has now raised $180 million in equity and $300 million in debt. Portage Ventures, Wellington, Crosslink Capital, 53 Stations, Titanium Ventures, Spice, and Florida Funders joined the round.
Jumbo shrimps
Flex CEO Zaid Rahman calls his customers "jumbo shrimps," mid-sized businesses earning tens to hundreds of millions in annual revenue. Too big for consumer fintech, too small for the enterprise software Silicon Valley prefers to build.
"In the U.S., there are maybe 350,000 to 400,000 business owners that manage 40% of America's payroll," Rahman told Reuters. "Globally, it's about 3 million business owners that manage 50% of the global economy."
His pitch rests on an observation about how these owners actually live. Their business and personal finances are intertwined, and their banks insist on treating them as two separate customers. So Flex bundles business banking, a charge card, private credit, bill pay, treasury, and the owner's personal finances into one platform, with an AI assistant called Beacon AI that sends a weekly read on the money. In December, the company launched Flex Elite, a consumer card that caters to the personal spending of wealthy owners. Rahman has claimed that many of his customers gave up the American Express Centurion card to switch.
Rahman founded the company in 2022 as Flexbase, a construction fintech, after watching his father run a construction business in Dubai. The elder Rahman suffered a heart attack when a customer refused to pay a multimillion-dollar invoice. His son, a Thiel Fellow who dropped out of Columbia and had already built and sold two companies, decided the problem was credit and went to work on it. The company emerged from stealth in September 2023 with a card-and-expense product. Rahman has said the rebrand to Flex was partly inspired by hearing Drake's "Rich Flex" while planning a redesign that year.
The numbers since then, most of them company-provided, describe a steep climb. In March 2025, Flex raised $25 million at just under a $250 million valuation. A $60 million Series B led by Portage followed in December. If the leaked $1.2 billion figure holds, the company has marked up roughly fivefold in sixteen months. Flex says it has passed $10 billion in annualized payment volume, that annualized revenue has tripled since December, and that it plans to grow from 110 employees to more than 200 by year-end.
Ramp and Brex own spend management for venture-backed companies. Mercury owns the startup deposit. Airwallex runs cross-border rails in more than 120 countries. None of them builds around the owner's household, which is Flex's wedge, though the harder displacement is the arrangement most of these owners already have: a regional bank for the business and an Amex for the spend, plus a wirehouse private banker if the family is rich enough.
There is a regulatory clock running underneath the launch. The GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin law enacted last July, gave regulators one year to finalize its implementing rules. The OCC published its proposed rule in March; the FDIC followed in April, and none of the agencies has issued a final rule with the statutory deadline set for Saturday. Flex Global is launching onto rails whose final rules do not yet exist.
Halo Fund
Halo Fund is fourteen months old. Smith and Sweeney launched it in May 2025 as Halo Experience Co, hard-capped at $1 billion, headquartered in Sandy with a second office in Palo Alto. The two met through Qualtrics, where Sweeney led Accel's investment after a year of unreturned calls. Sweeney later put personal money into the Jazz through Smith Entertainment Group.
What Halo sells founders is access to a sports and entertainment platform the firm describes as spanning the NBA, the NHL, and Formula 1. Sweeney has been direct about what the firm is not. "This isn't a sports fund," he told the Deseret News. "It's a tech fund aiming to leverage the power of sports." The firm plans 20 to 25 investments, growth-stage only. Smith told Upstarts Media it is hard to provide a halo effect for companies that are still just an idea.
In a post marking the fund's first nine months, Smith counted eight portfolio companies and nearly $300 million invested, and said Halo had "already backed two great Utah companies." Only one Utah deal is public: in September, Halo co-led Filevine's $400 million round alongside Accel and Insight Partners, an investment Upstarts Media reported doubled the Salt Lake City legal tech company's valuation to $3 billion. In October, the fund made a strategic secondary investment in 1Password, which it called its flagship cybersecurity bet. Flex is the third public deal. The rest of the portfolio, including the second Utah company, is undisclosed.
Smith led the Flex round personally, as a strategic investor. "Their business and personal financial lives are completely intertwined, but every bank treats them as two different customers," he said in the announcement. The release is explicit about the trade: Halo's audience of middle-market business owners, many far from Silicon Valley, is the customer Flex Global was built to reach.
Why this matters to Utahns
Flex is not a Utah company. The money is. Halo's two largest disclosed checks now sit in a Salt Lake City legal tech firm worth $3 billion and a San Francisco fintech reportedly worth $1.2 billion, and the fund that wrote them operates out of Sandy, next to the practice facility Smith built for his hockey team.
For most of its history, Silicon Slopes exported companies and imported capital. Qualtrics took Accel's money, and Filevine took Insight's before either firm was a household name here. The Flex deal runs in the other direction. A fund based in Silicon Slopes priced a San Francisco round in stablecoins and AI banking, categories where Utah has rarely been the one setting terms.
By Smith's own accounting, Halo has deployed nearly $300 million. Roughly $700 million remains.
