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Ryan Smith's Halo Fund backs Flex in $70 million round. July 14, 2026 Sandy, Utah - July 14, 2026 Utah entrepreneur Ryan Smith has made another high-profile venture bet. Halo Fund, the investment firm Smith co-founded with Accel partner Ryan Sweeney, has led a $70 million funding B1 round for San Francisco fintech Flex, pushing the AI-native private banking company to a $1.2 billion valuation just six months after its previous financing. The deal underscores Smith's growing influence beyond Utah's startup ecosystem. Since founding Qualtrics and assembling a sports empire that includes ownership of the Utah Jazz and Utah Mammoth, Smith has increasingly turned his attention to venture investing through Halo Fund, backing companies that sit at the intersection of technology, artificial intelligence and global scale. While Halo Fund is closely identified with Smith and Utah, Flex is headquartered in San Francisco, where it was founded in 2023 by CEO Zaid Rahman. The company is building an AI-powered private banking platform for high-net-worth business owners and also maintains a New York office. Utah-based Halo Fund, launched by Smith and Sweeney in 2025 with offices in Sandy, Utah, and Palo Alto, California, led the $70 million investment. The fund positions itself as more than a traditional venture firm, leveraging Smith's reach across technology, professional sports and entertainment to help portfolio companies accelerate growth. Flex, headquartered in the Ferry Building overlooking the San Francisco Bay, announced the financing today. Founded in 2023 by CEO Zaid Rahman, Flex is building what it describes as an AI-native private banking platform for high-net-worth business owners. Rather than treating business and personal finances separately, the platform combines banking, payments, credit, expense management, treasury and AI-powered financial tools into a single system designed for entrepreneurs whose businesses operate across multiple countries and currencies. The company plans to use the capital to expand Flex Global, a platform that allows business owners to move money across more than 100 countries using stablecoin-based payment infrastructure. The company says the service supports banking in 76 countries and 32 currencies, enabling international payments to settle in minutes rather than days. For Flex, the timing is notable. The company says annualized revenue has tripled since closing a $60 million Series B in December 2025, while annualized payment volume has climbed past $10 billion. In total, the company has now raised $180 million in equity and $300 million in debt financing. Smith said Flex addresses a longstanding problem facing entrepreneurs. "I've spent my career helping entrepreneurs win, and they all have the same problem: their business and personal financial lives are completely intertwined, but every bank treats them as two different customers," Smith said in a statement. For Smith, the deal further expands Halo Fund's portfolio of growth-stage technology companies and underscores Utah's continued influence in venture investing. Since selling Qualtrics and building one of the country's most prominent sports ownership portfolios, Smith has increasingly focused on backing companies that combine artificial intelligence with large, underserved markets. With Flex now valued at $1.2 billion and targeting global expansion, Halo Fund is betting that private banking for entrepreneurs could become one of fintech's next major growth categories. RECENT PRESS RELEASES July 14, 2026

Halo Fund leads $70M investment into AI-Native Private Banking Platform Flex to accelerate the launch of Flex Global. The pre-emptive $70 million equity funding comes just six months after the last round as Flex expands its AI-native private banking platform to 100+ countries on stablecoin rails, banking and moving owners' money globally in minutes, not days. San Francisco, CA - July 14, 2026; Flex today announced a $70 million Series B1, led by Ryan Smith and Ryan Sweeney's Halo Fund with participation from Portage Ventures, Wellington, Crosslink Capital, 53 Stations, Titanium Ventures, Spice, Florida Funders, Spice, and others. The round comes just months after the company's $60 million Series B in December 2025. Annualized revenue increased 3x since then as Flex accelerated private banking for high-net-worth business owners globally. Halo Fund, co-founded by Utah Jazz and Utah Mammoth owner and Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith and Accel general partner Ryan Sweeney, brings a sports and entertainment platform spanning the NBA, NHL, and Formula 1. For Flex, the partnership pairs institutional depth with distribution into audiences that include millions of successful middle-market business owners and entrepreneurs, often in communities far beyond Silicon Valley, the exact customers Flex Global is built to serve. With this round, Flex has now raised $180 million in total equity and $300 million in total debt for expansion across business finance, personal finance, payments, private credit, and ERP. Flex will double the team size from 110 employees today to more than 200 by year-end. "Middle-market business owners are one of the most important and underserved customers in finance globally," said Zaid Rahman, CEO and Founder of Flex. "Depending on the type of owner, they'll tell you their vendors are spread across the US, Poland, Brazil, etc; their accounts hold currency outside of just USD; and they have to oscillate across 2-3 vendors and layers of fees just to do business outside their country." Silicon Valley built financial software for companies, and it built financial software for consumers. It largely missed the people who are both. In the US alone, roughly 350,000 high-net-worth business owners help drive 40% of private-sector payroll, yet most still run their financial lives through tools that treat the business and the owner as two separate worlds. Globally, an estimated 3 million such owners sit at the center of a meaningful share of private economic activity and nearly all of them are multi-entity, multi-currency, and multi-jurisdiction by default. Ryan Smith, co-founder of Halo Fund and owner of the Utah Jazz and Utah Mammoth, led the round as a strategic investor and commented: "I've spent my career helping entrepreneurs win, and they all have the same problem: their business and personal financial lives are completely intertwined, but every bank treats them as two different customers, missing what they're actually trying to build. Flex is the first team creating a real private bank around the owner and the entire household's finances, and the gap they're filling is just as real globally as it is in the US. Zaid and the team have built an enduring business that is becoming an institution for the world's most ambitious owners." A business built for global owners The high-net-worth business owner rarely operates in a single country or a single currency. Today, Flex is launching Flex Global. Building financial infrastructure for that reality: * Stablecoin payment rails and wallets in 100+ countries, settling cross-border payments in minutes * Institutional USD accounts for foreign business owners who need access to the world's reserve currency * Multi-currency accounts across 76 countries, supporting 32 currencies from USD to RMB to INR to MXN, so owners can hold, send, and receive in the currencies they actually operate in * Private credit solutions in 20+ countries, extending Flex's underwriting well beyond US borders * Cards issued to businesses operating globally, spanning entities and geographies under one platform The result is a single financial home that follows the owner wherever their business takes them. The company today * Flex has crossed $10 billion in annualized total payment volume, growing roughly 4x year-over-year at a nine-figure annualized revenue run rate * The average Flex customer now uses four or more products on the platform, a signal of the compounding relationship Flex is built to create, where each product deepens the value of the next * Flex's three largest business categories by logo count are construction, wholesale, and multinational businesses For two decades, fintech served two markets: mass-market banking for consumers, and corporate workflows for venture-backed startups and large enterprises. It largely bypassed the high-net-worth business owner, who operates across multiple entities, currencies, and jurisdictions, because the rails to serve them globally didn't exist. Over the past eighteen months, they arrived. Stablecoin legislation in the US and Europe made the rails enterprise-ready, the world's largest payment networks moved from pilots to production, and Visa's stablecoin settlement volume reached a multibillion-dollar annualized run rate. Real-economy stablecoin payment volume roughly doubled in 2025, the majority of it B2B. Flex's bet is that the winners of this shift won't be the companies that make owners think about stablecoins, they'll be the ones that make the rails invisible. Flex Global embeds stablecoin settlement underneath a full private-banking relationship: an owner pays a vendor in Warsaw or Mexico City the way they'd pay one in Dallas, with AI helping them make decisions across their entire balance sheet. The customer never touches a wallet; their money simply moves in minutes. What Flex is building Flex is the AI-native private banking platform for high-net-worth business owners in the middle market globally, built around five pillars: private credit, a business-finance stack, a personal-finance stack, payments, and an agentic back office finance operating system built for middle-market companies. Today the platform brings together credit, banking, payment processing, bill pay, expense management, treasury, and enterprise finance AI agents including Beacon AI. Over time, Flex plans to expand its global banking, personal credit and rewards cards, treasury, travel, and mortgage offerings. About Flex Launched in 2023, Flex is the AI-native private bank for high-net-worth business owners in the middle market, built on a five-pillar strategy spanning private credit, business finance, personal finance, payments, and ERP. Flex supports every step of an owner's financial life, from the moment they earn revenue to the moment they spend it personally. Visit www.flex.one. About Halo Fund Halo Fund is an investment platform dedicated to fueling the growth of high-potential businesses. The fund helps companies accelerate by providing access to the arenas where attention and adoption scale fastest: the convergence of technology, sports, and entertainment. Founded by Ryan Smith and Ryan Sweeney, drawing on their experience at Qualtrics, Accel, the Utah Jazz, and the Utah Mammoth, the team brings decades of combined expertise as operators and investors in technology. This perspective positions Halo Fund to guide companies through today's rapidly shifting business landscape. At its core, Halo Fund is built on a simple conviction: the drivers of sustainable growth have changed. Capital and connections alone are no longer enough. Success now depends on harnessing cultural momentum to break through barriers, define markets, and engage directly with the audiences that matter most. By partnering with visionary founders and high-growth companies, Halo Fund helps portfolio businesses capture attention, accelerate adoption, and scale with impact in an increasingly dynamic market environment. For more information, visit halofund.com or follow on X @halo_fund.

Flex, an AI startup offering banking services for mid-sized businesses, has raised $70 million in a funding round led by Halo Fund. A source close to the deal said the B1 round valued the three-year-old company at around $1.2 billion, more than double its valuation six months ago. The company has now raised $180 million in equity and $300 million in debt. Flex targets mid-sized businesses earning tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, a segment CEO Zaid Rahman says is overlooked by traditional fintechs. Unlike AI startups focusing on individual tasks, Flex bundles private credit, business finance, personal finance and payment tools into one platform. The company said it has a few thousand customers and is growing roughly four-fold year-over-year at a nine-figure annualised revenue run rate.