Bad times in Silicon Valley? Not if you’re a startup serving other startups

Things should be dismal in Silicon Valley right now, with technology’s biggest companies under attack from regulators, lawmakers and even President Donald Trump.

Not for Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi. The two Stanford dropouts, both 23, are the founders of Brex, one of the hottest young companies today. Their startup’s mission? To provide charge cards to other startups.

“We knew that if we could build what we wanted to build, people would want it,” Dubugras said. “We never had questions about that.”

Dubugras, sporting a black hoodie and tortoiseshell glasses, was speaking from Brex’s new San Francisco headquarters, where an orange “511572” mural displayed the bank identification numbers that appear on all its charge cards.

The 2-year-old startup moved into the sun-filled space this year as investors poured in tens of millions of dollars, valuing Brex at $2.6 billion — and making Dubugras and Franceschi worth roughly $430 million each on paper, according to EquityZen, a marketplace for private stocks.

Brex is an example of Silicon Valley’s unflagging startup exuberance, even amid the Big Tech backlash. Startups raised $55 billion in venture capital in the first half of this year, the most since 2000, according to CB Insights and PwC. And a burgeoning class of these companies is thriving by catering to a fast-growing market: other startups.

Apart from Brex, there is Carta, which helps startup employees manage their equity and is valued at $1.7 billion. There is Guideline, which provides retirement services to startups. There are Brex copycats. And there is InterPrime, which helps startups manage their “idle cash” and has more than 50 customers.

“Startups are great because they’re underserved and provide a lot of feedback to companies like ours,” said Kanishka Maheshwari, a founder of InterPrime, based in Menlo Park, California.

Brex’s journey began in Bra