Setting finance free to build healthier businesses

Ramp says its plug-in with Copilot for Microsoft 365 means businesses don’t have to bounce between multiple tools and applications to gather spend insights or set up advanced controls. “Now they can use natural language to access Ramp’s smart AI assistant from their workspace and get the most advanced work done faster,” said Ramp CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman.

Now, employees who use the Microsoft messaging app, even on mobile, can find expense-related information right at their fingertips and have their questions answered by a knowledgable AI assistant. The Ramp integration in Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot also includes interactive actions, such as approvals, that Ramp customer administrators can set up. That way, if an employee asks for approval on an expense, the Ramp bot can verify that the expense is in line with the company’s policy and approve it right within Teams. “When the chance appeared to integrate into the Copilot ecosystem, we were really excited because we saw this as a very intuitive way to not just do things effortlessly, but to extend Ramp’s capabilities…to where people work,” CEO Eric Glyman told VentureBeat.

It used to be that when employees swiped their corporate credit cards, it wasn’t connected to software that the finance team could immediately access. Enter Ramp. At four and a half years old, the fast-growing fintech company leads the LinkedIn Top Startups 2023 list, a data-driven ranking of the young businesses where U.S. professionals most want to work. Ramp’s model has attracted high-profile customers such as Eventbrite, Discord, Glossier and Shopify. The Finance Files sat down with Glyman, Ramp’s CEO, to discuss what makes this fintech upstart so appealing to customers, investors and employees.

Ramp CEO Eric Glyman speaks with CNBC's Jon Fortt about the fintech landscape for businesses, Ramp's latest funding round, and Eric's entrepreneurial journey.

Ramp CEO Eric Glyman discusses why the firm raised $300 million from investors at a $5.8 billion valuation. He speaks with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Technology."

Ramp has surpassed $300 million in annualized revenue, a metric that multiplies the current month’s revenue 12 times, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Eric Glyman said in an interview with Bloomberg News. Ramp’s pitch to customers is that their incentives are aligned. The firm, which offers a corporate card, says that it helps customers reduce spending, unlike some credit card businesses. The company recently expanded into procurement software with Ramp Plus. It also acquired Cohere.io, an AI-powered customer support business. Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella was announced as an investor and adviser. There is still plenty of room for growth because the total addressable market Ramp’s chasing is large, due to the large number of companies with finance departments, Glyman said. We have “99% of the market left to go,” he added.

Geoff Charles, VP of Product at Ramp has led the product team from the early days, including the development and release of 60+ products and features in the past year alone. In this podcast, he and Lenny discuss how velocity is at the heart of Ramp’s culture and success, Ramp's approach to hiring, problem-solving, and execution, as well as tips on how to break into and succeed in product management.

Hypergrowth could also describe Ramp’s own trajectory, with the company reporting 100% growth in global customers and 83% growth in enterprise customers in the last six months alone. Now with Ramp Plus and Shopify under its belt, the startup is poised to continue its expansion, challenging corporate card stalwarts like American Express and SAP Concur. “We also are the most comprehensive financial operations solution available in the market,” Glyman told VentureBeat. “Ramp is the only company aligning our bottom line with our customers spending less. That’s why we’re seeing industry-leading growth, with the majority of Ramp’s enterprise and midmarket customers in the last 6 months coming from AmEx, Bill, Concur, or Expensify.”

The company’s automation product was used by teams like Ramp and Deel to generate “high-quality support knowledge” from existing customer interactions, and automatically resolve up to 60% of tickets, the company said. As part of the acquisition, Ramp said all customers will continue to be served “in maintenance mode,” but it will focus its efforts on adapting the LLM-powered automation product to help Ramp customers automate their workflows and better use and understand their spend data.

"For many people going to [software-as-a-service] vendors, it's very hard these days to know that you're getting a great price," Ramp cofounder and CEO Eric Glyman tells Forbes of the company's new AI-powered contract analysis tool. "Often your only resort is to go to a pricing page that may not tell you anything, or ask around." With GPT-4, Ramp can take vendor contracts that businesses upload and automatically pull out details such as pricing and software seats. The service then compares the pricing against anonymized data from the close to $1 billion some 15,000 companies spend on Ramp each month to show how the quoted price compares to market averages on a graph—and say whether it's a good deal. If it's not, Ramp can then go back to vendors and negotiate prices, using their data as leverage...Glyman says he believes Ramp is the first company bringing large-scale pricing data to consumers.

With the introduction of new AI features, corporate finance teams will have improved oversight, Ramp CEO Eric Glyman told Reuters. For instance, companies will be able to better detect unusual employee spending in real time, said Ramp investor Logan Bartlett of Redpoint Ventures.

Ramp, a fintech startup that is noted for being one of the fastest-growing companies ever to hit $100M in ARR, is among the fintech frontrunners using automation and machine learning to help customers with expense management, payments, reporting, and more. The upside of automated, intelligent, personalized, and more secure financial services with the help of AI is in reach.

Over time, Ramp said it has helped its customers cut expenses by over $400 million. It counts over 15,000 businesses as customers with “well into hundreds of thousands of users” and is onboarding about 1,000 users per day...“We think that our customers evaluate companies and their character, and what they’ve done, not just at a moment in time, but what they’ve done over the years,” Glyman said. “I think when other players in the market don’t serve companies or change their behavior rapidly, companies will often ask their peers who they recommend.”

If last year is any indication, Ramp’s product-first, gimmick-free approach has struck a chord, especially with small-business owners. More than 13,000 businesses now use the platform, a threefold increase year over year. Ramp has issued more than 240,000 employee credit cards, providing the company with a steady stream of interchange income. In March 2022, Ramp disclosed that it had reached $100 million in annualized revenue.

"Ramp said in the blog post announcing the product that it wants to be more than just a vendor, aiming to create genuine partnerships with accounting firms."

"With its international play, Ramp customers—all based in the United States—can now pay vendors in foreign currencies within minutes or reimburse employees in two days or less for out-of-pocket expenses overseas...The push helps expand Ramp’s reach in the $120 trillion payments market as many fintechs struggle... CEO Eric Glyman says, 'Now as the cost of capital keeps going way up, and combined with other challenges, this idea of being more efficient with your spending and time has gone from being nice to a real necessity.'"

"Ramp [is appealing to] an ethos of humble growth...'If you can help people go home earlier and spend time with their families and do more things for less, I think that should work,' CEO Eric Glyman said."

"The offering builds upon Ramp’s Bill Pay service, which automates payments by using artificial intelligence to process email invoices in seconds and then approve payments via credit card, ACH or check. Glyman notes Bill Pay is Ramp’s fastest-growing offering yet. After launching last October, it took just six months to surpass $1 billion in annualized volume, less than half the time it took Ramp’s cards to cross that threshold... Glyman says at the rate Bill Pay is growing, it could surpass card volume as soon as next year."

“Ramp, a corporate card and spend-management startup, launched a new financing option for its bill-pay product Tuesday that will allow customers to stretch — or "Flex" — payments between 30 and 90 days...Ramp's announcement described it as the first service of its kind where businesses can finance all bills…CEO Eric Glyman anticipates that Flex funding could be particularly useful in helping companies manage expenses such as inventory, especially in an era when supply chain delays are common.”

"Corporate management startup Ramp says it has seen its business grow exponentially across all segments in 2022 so far."

"One of the corporate card industry's fastest-growing players just received a boost as it nabs clients from the industry's biggest names like American Express, Capital One, and Silicon Valley Bank."

"Ramp has been building its finance platform for businesses, including a corporate card that tracks employees’ expenses and a bill-pay service that’s its fastest-growing product. The company...now handles more than $5 billion of payments volume on its platform annually, with revenue growing almost 10-fold last year."

"Today, more than 5,000 businesses use Ramp, powering over $5 billion in annualized payments volume. Notably, its customer base is up 7x and cardholder growth is up 15x year-over-year. Some of its larger customers spend “in excess of $10 million a month” with Ramp, Glyman said."

"Barely a year after its launch, Ramp is the fastest-growing corporate card in the United States. Its 2,000 enterprise customers—from the real estate broker Douglas Elliman to the creative agency Red Antler—use Ramp to consolidate corporate cards, expense management, bill payment, and more into one Slack-integrated platform."

"The startup’s goal with the new offering, which will be offered to all existing customers and any new ones at no additional cost, according to Glyman is to help business travelers 'book anywhere' while giving businesses an 'unprecedented level of insight and control over their travel.'"

"Because the stablecoins have a higher yield, Song says, than, say, an investment-grade corporate bond, that 5% allocation Ramp has made to stablecoins is able to provide it with the same level of returns it would see from a 95% allocation to those bonds."

"The start-up has grown rapidly this year by offering small and medium-sized businesses a cashback card paired with software that identifies ways clients can save money. Ramp says that transaction volumes have jumped 50% in the two months since the company last raised funds at a $3.9 billion valuation."

"Endowments notched their biggest investment gains in decades, thanks to portfolios boosted by huge VC returns...Corporate credit-card company Ramp, which launched early last year, has raised two rounds of financing already this year, with the company’s valuation rising to nearly $4 billion, an extraordinary run for a two-year-old startup."

“The biggest opportunity in fintech is to turn this upside down and build companies where business incentives are aligned with what's best for the customer.”

"Ramp offers a corporate credit card with zero fees, no interest rates and cashback rewards, but it aims to differentiate itself with an expense-management platform that uses artificial intelligence to analyze transactions and identify savings opportunities."

"Ramp, which had already started offering cards to a few other start-ups before its public launch in February 2020, now facilitates more than $1bn in annualised transaction volume, which Glyman said makes it the fastest-growing corporate card in the US. 'We’re collapsing a lot of the software processes and doing some of the heavy lifting,' Glyman said. 'An interesting product can be built when we do it that way.'"