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Ramp, a $7.65 billion corporate credit card and expense company, makes its debut on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, riding the generative AI wave.
By Richard NievaForbes Staff
When Eric Glyman debuted his fintech startup Ramp in February 2020, he expected the usual challenges of starting a new business: long hours, finding talent, marketing an unknown product. What he didn’t expect was for half of his New York City employees to fall mysteriously ill just a week after the company launched.
Over the next few weeks, as the Covid-19 pandemic spurred global lockdowns and stalled economies, Glyman found himself hawking Ramp’s take on corporate credit cards into a market where spending suddenly stopped. It was an existential crisis, and he was only a month into the job.
“There was never anything like it,” Glyman tells Forbes. “If you go back 100 years, as long as there were modern credit records, you’d never seen an event where half of businesses were forced by law to shut down and revenues went to zero.”
As companies around the world went into economic survival mode, Ramp doubled down on the principle Glyman argues sets it apart from other corporate card companies — to save customers money, instead of enticing them to spend more. It was a pitch that worked uniquely well during the pandemic: businesses were trying to cut costs amid uncertain times, helping Ramp find its niche. “It went from a really scary couple of weeks to maybe the reason why Ramp is where we are today,” said Glyman.
Corporate thriftiness is such a core tenet of Ramp’s pitch that its north star metric is how much it reduces a customer’s spend per year: 5% on average. Board member Keith Rabois, a partner at Khosla Ventures, predicts another milestone on the horizon — doubling the average savings of Ramp customers to 10%, sometime in the next “six to 18 months,” he told Forbes.
Now Ramp, valued at $7.65 billion as of April, claims it’s the fastest growing corporate card in the U.S. The company tells Forbes it is now processing $35 billion a year in “total purchase volume,” industry-speak for the combined dollar amount of transactions on the platform, up 250% from $10 billion in May 2023. Annualized gross revenue in 2023 was $300 million, and Forbes estimates it has close to doubled to $600 million in 2024. Ramp declined to comment.
“It went from a really scary couple of weeks to maybe the reason why Ramp is where we are today.”
But while it’s rooted in the stodgy world of banking, Ramp has aggressively embraced the cloud and artificial intelligence to automate almost every aspect of finance management for a corporate customer. As a result, Ramp is debuting this year on the Forbes Cloud 100 list of the world’s top private cloud computing companies, coming in at No. 37, five spots ahead of rival Brex. While the list is dominated by AI, with ChatGPT maker OpenAI taking the top spot, Ramp represents the expansion of fintech companies into the cloud as they expand their purview beyond just credit cards.
Along with Ramp’s physical and digital credit cards, it also offers expense management and HR capabilities like accounts payable that it’s augmented with a growing suite of cloud-based AI features, built on OpenAI’s GPT-4. The idea is to offer a one-stop shop for all of a company’s spend management, instead of using, for example, a Chase card, then going to the Expensify app. The lack of a full suite of services “is a blind spot for some of the large incumbents, the old guard,” said Kevin Permenter, an analyst covering fintech apps at the research firm IDC.
The company touts a high tech flair that traditional credit card companies don’t offer, like being able to issue special-purpose cards to individual employees with specific spending limits. Most of those software features are free, but for access to some premium services like supporting multiple currencies, the startup charges $15 per user per month for a package called Ramp Plus.
Its core business, though, is still interchange fees, the cut the company takes out of every customer transaction. Ramp declined to share its fee, only noting that typical interchange rates in the U.S. range from 1 to 3 percent (rival Brex’s fee is 2.7%). Ramp doesn’t take the whole slice; the company splits the take with several parties, including its credit card partner Visa, Ramp’s commissioning bank and the customer’s bank, and the customer themselves through Ramp’s cashback program. Ramp also takes a cut from travel expenses when customers book through Ramp’s online portal.
Investors have taken notice. The company has raised $1.2 billion to date from investors as diverse as Sequoia, Greylock, Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, the payments company Stripe, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and Founders Fund, where Rabois first made the investment before returning to Khosla Ventures. “It’s pretty intuitive,” Rabois said. “I would be foolish not to want my new fund, KV, to be an investor in what I think is one of the best run private companies on the planet.”
Ramp is banking on AI to fuel its growth in the future. Cofounder and CTO Karim Atiyeh sees Ramp’s moonshot as eventually creating AI agents to serve as executive assistants or business negotiators. “I’m looking forward to the day where I could just tell Ramp, ‘Book my flight back home.’ And it knows where home is, when my last meeting is, what the policy of my company is, it’s all taken care of,” Atiyeh said.
“I would be foolish not to want my new fund, KV, to be an investor.”
But for now, they’re focused on the nuts and bolts of daily business. For instance, the service can help businesses analyze vendor contracts by pulling out key details like pricing information and account seats. Then it compares prices and other information with aggregated vendor data from the more than 25,000 companies on Ramp. The software can also review compliance requirements, produce weekly digests about how the company is spending, and make sure customers aren’t wasting money on redundant tools from other vendors or duplicate account seats.
Those digital capabilities have allowed Ramp to make inroads with organizations across several industries. There are political campaigns (Ramp won’t disclose who), tech companies Shopify and Eventbrite, the Boys and Girls Club of America, and Walther Farms, one of Ramp’s earliest customers, which supplies potatoes to Frito-Lay and Kettle. Josh Reeves, CFO of Walther Farms, estimates his company has saved more than half a million dollars using Ramp over the last four years, including $295,000 from cashback rebates and more than $90,000 in subscription savings compared to the farm’s old expense management software. He said Ramp’s invoice management system helps easily categorize purchases from different vendors, distinguishing between spare parts for tractors and harvesters.
Despite its broad customer base, Ramp faces a formidable foe in fellow fintech Brex, founded two years earlier and now valued at $12.3 billion, with customers including DoorDash and Warby Parker. Both startups are still tiny compared to legacy card companies like American Express. “The reality is, both Brex and us combined are probably somewhere around, like, 2% of the market at most,” Atiyah says. “So most businesses have not heard of either of us.”
Ramp faces other challenges, too. There’s a tension in Ramp’s stated mission of helping customers to spend less, while also making most of its money by taking a cut of each of their transactions. Glyman thinks the model is “just good for business in the long run.” “By helping people spend less, that’s how we grow. That’s how new customers find out about us, and how we serve more organizations.”
Meanwhile, regulatory scrutiny for fintech companies is only getting more intense. In a joint memo issued in late July, agencies including the Federal Reserve and FDIC warned traditional banks against their partnerships with fintech startups, highlighting concerns that the partnerships could strain risk management and compliance processes from the banks. Glyman dismissed those concerns, adding that Ramp made careful choices in vetting and picking its banking partners, Celtic and Sutton.
“At the time, I was definitely frustrated as hell.”
Glyman and Atiyeh have been business partners for a decade. The pair, who met as undergrads at Harvard, started their first company Paribus in 2014, while planning a vacation to Puerto Rico. After they booked their flights, they noticed the next day that the fare had gone down by about $100. They checked the airline policy, reclaimed their money and their price tracker alert business was born. The founders enrolled Paribus into Y Combinator, the elite startup incubator, and two years later sold the company to Capital One for an undisclosed amount.
Paribus became the basis for Capital One Shopping, and the founders landed in the bank’s credit card division. “They didn’t know what to do with us,” Glyman said, laughing. There were culture clashes from the beginning. Other teams got upset with them for building features too quickly — sometimes in 24 hours — lightning speed in a highly regulated industry, Atiyeh recalled. “It was like going from a speed boat to the cruise ship,” Glyman said. Atiyeh puts it more bluntly: “At the time, I was definitely frustrated as hell.”
Three years later, the pair founded Ramp. “We like the speed boat,” Glyman said.
Additional reporting by Emily Mason and Veronica Irwin.
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