The useful thing about an expense report is that it records more than spending. It records annoyance. A receipt forgotten in a jacket, a reimbursement waiting on payroll, a finance manager copying numbers into a second system: every small indignity becomes a line item. Brent Jackson spent enough time near those line items to notice that the corporate card was only the visible piece of a much larger problem.
Jackson had returned to California after studying finance and accounting at Gonzaga University. He joined Deloitte in San Francisco and spent roughly four years in the corporate tax group, a respectable beginning with a legible destination. He could see the partner track ahead. He could also see that he did not want it. So he left the ordered corridors of consulting for Accrualify, a venture-backed payments startup building accounts-payable and vendor-management software.
His title was operations manager. His job description, as he later put it, was “everything shy of writing code.” That phrase contains most of the founder curriculum: sell, listen, patch, explain, apologize, repeat. Accrualify put him in conversation with thousands of small and midsize businesses. The same complaint kept returning. Traditional cards offered credit, but the surrounding software was scattered across expense tools, spreadsheets, reimbursements and accounting systems.
“I was wearing a lot of hats. My title was Operations Manager, but I was doing everything shy of writing code.”Brent Jackson on his Accrualify role
01 / The irritation becomes a companyA ledger full of clues
The gap became Torpago’s original thesis: offer a corporate credit card with the spend-management software attached. A growing business should be able to issue employee cards, set limits, track transactions and reconcile the books without assembling a small orchestra of unrelated products. The idea was specific enough to test and broad enough to be dangerous. Every business spends money; not every business is creditworthy, reachable or eager to switch.
Jackson quit his job and raised $250,000 from friends and family. He was a solo founder. The first prototype came from a consulting team in India, reached through an investor connection. He was careful not to poach customers from Accrualify, so he leaned on investor networks and showed prospects mockups instead. Twenty-five people interacted with a clickable prototype before serious coding began. Ten joined the first iteration.
The MVP took about seven months. Jackson called it bare bones, which is a more useful description than the usual founder poetry. The bones still had to carry real weight. Torpago was not merely a software dashboard. When a customer spent on the card, somebody had to supply the credit and bear the risk. In the beginning, the company lent from the money it had raised. After six months of payment history, it secured a $3 million facility from Pier Asset Management and used it to serve its first 300 customers.
The early operation was lean: one sales representative, one operations employee, Jackson and a seven-person team in India. Direct sales proved difficult to scale. A partner program with affiliate links performed better, moving applications from hundreds a month into the thousands. Torpago was learning a recurring founder lesson in several dialects: the product is only half built until distribution works.
The economics were equally plain. In its direct-card phase, Torpago earned primarily from a share of interchange when customers used the Visa network. Jackson said the company avoided license and sign-up fees to lower the barrier to entry. Credit limits averaged about $35,000 in 2022, although some customers reached six figures. Those details explain why the early lending facility mattered so much. A software company can add another account with little marginal cost. A credit-card company must fund the spending, price the risk and collect the balance. Growth does not merely create more users; it creates a larger claim on capital. Torpago therefore had to prove two products at once: software a finance team would adopt and an underwriting operation a lender would trust. The dashboard could look modern, but the balance sheet still demanded old-fashioned evidence.
02 / A better questionWho should own the name on the card?
Torpago entered a loud market. Brex and Ramp had made corporate spending a venture-capital spectacle. American Express and Capital One had distribution, trust and decades of muscle memory. Jackson’s company built a competing card and learned from doing so. It also learned that competing for the same end customer was not the only use for what it had built.
The more interesting opportunity sat one layer beneath the brand. Community banks and credit unions already had business customers. What they often lacked was a modern commercial card program that combined issuance, real-time controls, expense software, fraud tools, accounting integrations and administration. Building all of that internally would be expensive and slow. Buying it as white-label infrastructure meant the institution could keep its own name in front of the customer.
Jackson has been candid about the change. Torpago started as a rival to Brex, Ramp and the large card issuers, he said, then realized that direct competition was not the market it wanted to pursue. The company launched its Powered By offering to provide the backend while banks retained the customer relationship. A founder’s original pitch can become an expensive piece of nostalgia. Jackson treated his as revisable.
“We started as a competitor with Brex and Ramp, as well as American Express and Capital One.”Brent Jackson on Torpago’s first market
The shift also changed the definition of product quality. A direct card startup can obsess over the cardholder’s screen. Infrastructure has more constituencies. The bank needs oversight. Its business customer needs controls. Finance teams need clean data. Compliance teams need an audit trail. Implementation has to connect old systems to new ones without turning launch day into an archaeological dig.
03 / The quiet machineryFintech grows up and moves backstage
In June 2024, Torpago announced a $10 million Series B co-led by Priority Tech Ventures and EJF Ventures, with BankTech Ventures and existing investors participating. The stated use of the money was revealing: strengthen implementation and compliance resources while continuing to expand the product. Those are not decorative functions. In bank technology, the backstage crew determines whether the show opens.
Jackson also pointed toward using artificial intelligence and large language models in underwriting, credit memos and risk scores. The ambition fits his longer arc. His earliest complaint about traditional business cards was never that the plastic lacked glamour. It was that information sat in the wrong places and forced people to perform work that software could coordinate. Better models are valuable if they reduce that labor while preserving the judgment and controls finance requires.
The company’s current description is correspondingly infrastructural: a modular, cloud-native platform for branded business cards, spend management and bank administration. Its target is no longer only the business owner swiping a card. It is also the institution trying to offer that owner a credible modern product without surrendering the relationship to a national issuer or a consumer-facing fintech.
Four useful notes from Jackson’s playbook
- Wait for a complaint to repeat before calling it a market.
- Give prospects something clickable before asking engineers for something permanent.
- Let the first product teach you which layer of the market carries the most leverage.
- Keep listening after revenue arrives. Strategy can still be a draft.
04 / The founder underneathA product person in an accountant’s clothing
Jackson calls himself a product founder. It is a slightly surprising self-portrait for someone trained in accounting and corporate tax, until one considers what accounting teaches: systems matter, exceptions accumulate, and the truth is usually hiding in a reconciliation. His public conversations return repeatedly to customers’ pain points. He likes hearing what makes a job difficult and building something that removes the difficulty.
People around him have used words such as scrappy and coachable. The record makes those descriptions plausible without turning them into mythology. He started alone. He borrowed talent through a consulting team. He tested mockups with a small group. He changed acquisition channels when direct sales lagged. Later, he changed the company’s position when the bank platform offered a clearer route.
There is a pleasing circularity to the story. Jackson left a large professional-services firm because he did not want to spend his career as a consultant. He then built a company that succeeds partly by understanding institutions, integrating with their systems and doing difficult implementation work. The difference is that the advice now arrives as functioning software. The deck becomes a dashboard. The recommendation becomes a card program.
Torpago’s aspiration is broad but legible: give banks and credit unions the infrastructure to run modern commercial card programs at their own pace and under their own brands. Jackson’s part in that future may remain largely invisible to the person tapping a card at a terminal. That is the bargain of infrastructure. When it works, the user sees a simple gesture. Somewhere behind it, a very complicated ledger balances.