Flex secures $70 million from Ryan Smith’s Halo fund to expand its AI private banking services worldwide.

      Six months prior, Flex secured $60 million, branding it as a Series B round. On Tuesday, the company announced it had raised an additional $70 million, opting to label it Series B1 instead of proceeding further down the alphabet.

      The funding round was spearheaded by Halo, an investment firm established last year by Ryan Smith, the founder of Qualtrics, who is also the owner of the NBA's Utah Jazz and the NHL's Utah Mammoth. He partnered with his longtime supporter, Ryan Sweeney, a general partner at Accel.

      Participants in the round included Portage, Wellington, Crosslink Capital, 53 Stations, Titanium Ventures, Spice, and Florida Funders. Flex stated that this investment raises its total equity raised to $180 million, alongside $300 million in debt. The company's workforce currently stands at 110, with expectations to exceed 200 by year-end.

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      Flex's offering is particularly focused and, according to the company, has not been adequately addressed in the market. The firm presents itself as an AI-native private bank tailored for high-net-worth business owners in the middle market, serving those who are simultaneously the finance department of their companies and their wealthiest individual customers.

      Zaid Rahman, the founder and CEO of Flex, stated, "Middle-market business owners are one of the most significant yet underserved groups in global finance." He describes clients whose suppliers are spread across the US, Poland, and Brazil, often needing to engage multiple providers and incur fees just to make payments internationally.

      Flex estimates approximately 350,000 such owners in the US, contributing to around 40% of private-sector payroll, while the global figure is estimated to be near 3 million. These figures highlight that these owners typically operate across multiple entities, currencies, and jurisdictions, regardless of their intentions.

      What exactly does Flex Global offer? The product introduced alongside this funding round expands the platform beyond US borders. Flex Global provides stablecoin payment solutions in over 100 countries, multi-currency accounts in 76 countries covering 32 currencies, institutional dollar accounts for foreign owners, private credit across more than 20 countries, and cards issued across different entities and regions on a single platform.

      According to the company, cross-border payments are settled in minutes rather than days. The stablecoin element is designed to remain unobtrusive: an owner making a payment to a supplier in Warsaw does so as if they were paying one in Dallas, without needing to use a wallet.

      This reliance on seamless payment processing is made possible by recently accessible infrastructure. Visa’s settlement pilot achieved a $7 billion annualized run rate in April, reflecting a 50% increase over the previous quarter, and research from Artemis and McKinsey indicated that actual stablecoin payment volume roughly doubled in 2025, reaching about $390 billion, mostly from business-to-business transactions.

      Traditional financial institutions took note at around the same time. Mastercard's $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK signaled that the technology had advanced from pilot to actual operational infrastructure, while banks publicly debate which AI developments will shape the next decade.

      Flex reports an annualized payment volume that has surpassed $10 billion, experiencing approximately a fourfold year-on-year growth with a nine-figure revenue run rate, having seen revenue increase threefold since December.

      The major sectors represented among its client base are construction, wholesale, and multinational corporations. Smith, acting as a strategic investor, highlighted the challenge he is familiar with: "I’ve spent my career helping entrepreneurs succeed, and they all face the same issue: their business and personal finances are completely intertwined, yet every bank treats them as separate customers."

      What Halo contributes beyond financial support is its distribution network, spanning the NBA, NHL, and Formula 1—an unconventional sales route for a bank considering that Flex's clients were never part of Silicon Valley's typical network.

      Flex's platform already integrates various services, including credit, banking, payment processing, bill payment, expense management, treasury management, and a team of financial agents, one of which is called Beacon AI, into what Flex labels as an agentic back office.

      This positions it within an emerging category of agentic banking platforms designed to facilitate the movement of money through software rather than human intervention. Future developments on the roadmap include personal credit and rewards cards, treasury services, travel booking, and mortgages. The question of whether the owner of a mid-sized construction firm will want their bank to arrange their travel will likely be answered in the next funding round.