June 25, 2023

AI startup Cohere.io is joining Ramp to bring generative AI to finance

AI technology is rapidly evolving and its applications even faster. At Ramp we’re dedicated to pushing the frontiers of AI to help businesses save time and money, with innovations like Ramp Intelligence that uses GPT to deliver vendor price intelligence, effortless expense management, and an accounting copilot. I’m excited to share we’ve acquired Cohere.io, an AI-powered customer support platform that is at the forefront of generative AI and machine learning work. Led by Yunyu Lin and Rahul Sengottuvelu, the six-person Cohere team brings incredible talent that will greatly further our investment in AI innovations and accelerate our ability to help our customers save even more.

“Generative AI has the potential to help enterprises unlock a treasure trove of intelligence from the data they already have. We’re excited to apply what we’ve learned from the Cohere.io platform to deliver powerful, trustworthy AI that helps customers understand and automate their finances.” - Yunyu Lin

Deepening our AI expertise to drive real customer impact

I’ve long been impressed by Cohere’s use of generative AI and LLMs to improve the flow of customer feedback to product teams and help support teams resolve tickets faster. Their CEO and co-founder Yunyu Lin has applied AI to a wide range of other industries, including fintech and autonomous vehicles. In fact, he has deep roots with Ramp as a former early-stage Ramp employee working on the core platform—we’re glad to welcome him back to the team.

I’m also delighted to be working with Cohere’s CTO and co-founder Rahul Sengottuvelu. As the creator of the popular open source library jsonformer, he brings highly regarded AI expertise, used to extract useful information from unstructured data. Before co-founding Cohere, Rahul spent time working on Applied AI at Meta and crafting interfaces at Superhuman.

At Cohere, the team built generative AI and LLMs that successfully extracted and analyzed companies’ historical customer support data to resolve questions similar to the ones support teams were seeing in real time. Long before ChatGPT became mainstream, their technology was helping businesses automatically resolve up to 60% of tickets in a reliable and accurate way. Over 200 companies—including Ramp and other high-growth businesses like Deel, Loom, and SecureFrame—used Cohere to streamline their support operations and deliver better customer experiences. Their success led to $3.5 million in funding from Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, and others.

“At Cohere, our focus was building responsible, transformative AI products that accelerate and augment workflows. We’re going to continue doing this at Ramp to fuel the next chapter of growth, and to continue our mission of saving businesses time and money with responsible AI.” - Rahul Sengottuvelu

Cohere x Ramp: Harnessing AI to streamline complex financial operations

The Cohere team has a proven track record of applying generative AI to reduce the manual work of customer support teams. We’re excited to apply their deep expertise to financial operations in fresh and interesting ways.

Already they’re leading efforts to enable people to request and generate multi-step workflows without needing to know a single line of code. This will pave the way for organizations to codify and automate all of their financial processes in Ramp, no matter how complex.

The team is also building out Ramp’s capabilities to power contract extraction and pricing intelligence from receipts, invoices, and other expense documents. This will allow us to ensure customers always get the best price on software.

Just the beginning of helping finance teams reach their potential

We’re thrilled to have the Cohere team join Ramp to lead AI-related projects and applications that solve real problems for businesses and their people. With their help, we’ll build upon our success of using AI to smartly solve finance pain points and accelerate our pace for developing industry-leading finance solutions. We’ll expand our ability to analyze vast amounts of financial data to uncover even more cost-saving opportunities.

At Ramp, we’re always on the lookout for enterprising engineering talent. If you’re excited about bringing real power of AI to businesses, we’d love to connect—check out our careers page.

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