Why we raised $160 million — and what it’s really for

Today we announced our $160 million raise. Debt and equity, led by Bluff Point Associates.

Good day. But the number isn’t the story, and if I spend this whole post on the number I’ve wasted your time and mine. Here’s the story.

Millions of business owners are getting ready to retire and hand off their companies this decade. Not eventually. This decade. It’s the largest generational transfer of business ownership – McKinsey puts the value of the sellable ones somewhere around $5 trillion. It’s called the Silver Tsunami.

And most won’t sell the way they’re picturing. Some hand it to employees or family. But the vast majority never find a buyer – 92% end in closure, not sale (source: McKinsey). The doors just close.

Sit with that. About 11,000 people turn 65 every day (source: CBS News), and plenty of them own a business like this. These companies employ people and hold up whole towns. When they can’t find a buyer, those jobs don’t transfer – they disappear. These aren’t failing businesses. A lot of them are excellent – profitable, decades old, the kinds of companies towns grow together with. But when a buyer opens the books, what they find is no modernizations or investments to upgrade back office systems. Receipts in a drawer, messy bookkeeping. A monthly close that takes three weeks and still doesn’t tie out. The deal dies right there. Quietly. And the owner who built something real ends up closing the doors instead of handing over the keys.

Why does that happen? Because the tools these businesses run on were built for the owner who’s now on the way out. The person walking in behind them grew up expecting software that just works, that talks to everything else, that doesn’t take a finance degree to operate. Banks and card issuers have been slow to give it to them. Really slow.

That gap is the entire reason PEX exists. It’s what we’ve spent years building for. The money lets us build faster. That’s the honest, unglamorous version of why we continue to invest in our business.

So – the funding goes into three places.

First, into scaling our charge card program, which has held sustained triple-digit growth since launch in 2024 and the credit our customers draw on is funded by a facility from Clear Haven Capital Management.

We started PEX 20 years ago issuing pre-funded, prepaid cards and stayed long enough to get very good at the part most of the bank card industry skipped: granular card controls to the exact level a customer needs: one card, one site, one merchant, state, even time of day.

Everything else grew out of that. Once we conquered controls, we built out the software behind it to truly streamline our customers’ end to end processes. After that, they wanted the same controls on more spend and payment terms than a prepaid balance could carry, so we launched charge cards in 2024. Prepaid, charge and disbursement now sit on one platform under one set of unified, granular controls.

Second, a serious investment in AI, the kind that takes the manual grind – matching receipts, coding expenses, reconciling accounts, ordering cards, managing card balances – off people’s plates. 

The AI part is the line everyone says right now. So I’ll back it up with some third party info.

Forrester studied our customers late last year and built a model composite company from multiple examples in our portfolio – $25 million in revenue, 130 people, almost exactly the business described earlier in this piece. The AI and automation capabilities we’ve already shipped resulted in 8,700 hours handed back over 3 years. A monthly close that used to run 7 or 8 hours, done in minutes. Enough work quietly absorbed that they grew without hiring another person into finance – roughly $209,000 they never had to spend, inside about $1.1 million in total value. That was one modeled example, but the pattern behind it isn’t unique – other customers see the same kind of gains, some more, some less, depending on how far they lean in. The exact numbers vary; the direction doesn’t. This platform works hard for the people who have worked tirelessly since long before PEX was born.

Finally, a major investment in our people. We need to reach more of those owners caught in the Silver Tsunami… the ones who want to modernize their back offices so they can hand over the keys rather than turn off the lights. To date, we have helped our customers move over $11.7 billion. 

A business that runs on modern financial rails is worth more the day someone tries to buy it. Obvious once you say it out loud. Almost nobody acts on it. Clean books, numbers in real time, controls that don’t collapse the moment one person leaves – that’s what a buyer pays a premium for and it’s what lets an owner walk away on their own terms instead of turning off the lights. So this was never really about efficiency or about saving somebody an afternoon. It’s about whether thirty years of work becomes a sale or a shutdown. That’s the stake. That’s why I care about it more than I care about the headline number.

I don’t think any of this should belong only to the Fortune 500. It should belong to the 22-person crew. To the family business changing hands. To the person who just signed for a company someone else spent a lifetime building, and now has to make it theirs.

That’s what we’re building. Now we build it faster.

— Toffer Grant, CEO, PEX