Brex Leases 100,000 Square Feet of Offices in San Francisco

After shuttering its San Francisco headquarters to go remote-first, financial services company Brex is doubling down on in-person work with an even bigger office.

The financial tech firm leased about 100,000 square feet at 270 Brannan Street, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The company plans to move into the space in mid-November, a spokesperson told the Business Times, though it remains unclear if the new space will be designated as Brex’s headquarters.

Brex followed in other companies’ footsteps in 2021 by abandoning its 60,000-square-foot offices at 405 Howard Street and transitioning to a headquarters-less model. At the time, company co-founders Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras relocated to Los Angeles, though Dubugras relocated to Palo Alto two years later. That year, Brex opened an 8,300-square-foot office at 85 Second Street in San Francisco.

“As [artificial intelligence] continues to take the tech scene by storm, it’s imperative we have a strong presence in San Francisco,” a spokesperson told the Business Times when the company secured the Second Street office. “San Francisco and the Bay Area continue to thrive as a hotspot for startups and founders, attracting some of the brightest minds in the industry.”

Brex is the latest Bay Area-based company to recommit to office space after paring down or leaving its offices altogether during the pandemic.

In 2021, Snowflake eliminated its San Mateo headquarters designation, but late last year, the cloud-based data and analytics firm subleased a 773,000-square-foot campus in Menlo Park from Meta. Coinbase also got rid of its San Francisco headquarters designation in 2021; it signed a 150,000-square-foot lease at Mission Rock in May, though it is not going to consider that office its headquarters.

The AI sector is expected to increase office occupancy and attract tens of thousands of new workers to San Francisco and the Bay Area, according to CBRE. The firm predicts that over the next five years, AI companies will go from occupying 5 million square feet of offices to 21 million and bringing 50,000 to 60,000 new jobs to the region.

Brex employs around 1,100 people globally and boasts about $1.5 billion in funding, a company spokesperson told the Business Times.

— Chris Malone Méndez