There Has Never Been a Better Time to Be a Ramp Customer

When Eric Glyman co-founded Ramp in February 2020, he anticipated the usual challenges of launching a startup—long hours, building a team, and marketing an unfamiliar product. What he didn’t foresee was the chaos of a global pandemic just weeks after the company’s debut. A week into operations, half of Ramp’s New York City employees fell ill. Soon after, corporate spending ground to a halt as businesses shut down due to COVID-19 lockdowns.

“There was never anything like it,” Glyman told 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.”

Despite the turbulent start, Ramp found its footing and today offers corporate credit cards alongside expense management and HR capabilities. The company has integrated AI, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, to automate financial tasks and streamline corporate spending. Rather than using a mix of financial tools, a Chase card for transactions, Expensify for tracking, and separate HR software, Ramp aims to centralize everything into one platform.

Kevin Permenter, a fintech analyst at research firm IDC, believes this integrated approach highlights the weaknesses of traditional financial institutions. “The lack of a full suite of services is a blind spot for some of the large incumbents, the old guard,” he noted.

More Than Just a Corporate Card

Ramp’s value proposition extends beyond standard credit card services. The company enables businesses to issue special-purpose cards to individual employees with predefined spending limits, providing granular control over expenses. Most of these software features are offered for free, but Ramp charges $15 per user per month for its premium Ramp Plus package, which includes multi-currency support and other advanced features.

Despite its growing suite of products, Ramp’s core revenue stream remains interchange fees, the percentage taken from every transaction. While the company does not disclose its specific rate, it notes that interchange fees in the U.S. typically range between 1% and 3%. Brex, one of Ramp’s primary competitors, charges 2.7%. Ramp also shares a portion of these fees with Visa, its banking partners, and even customers through a cashback program. Additionally, Ramp earns money from travel expenses when customers book through its portal.

Glyman and Atiyeh

Glyman and his co-founder Karim Atiyeh have been business partners for over a decade. The two met as undergraduates at Harvard and launched their first company, Paribus, in 2014 after noticing a price drop on a flight they had just booked. Recognizing a business opportunity, they created a service that tracked price changes and automatically claimed refunds for users.

However, their experience at Capital One was marked by cultural friction. “They didn’t know what to do with us,” Glyman said. Atiyeh recounted frustrations with the slow pace of the corporate world, where their rapid development of new features—sometimes in 24 hours—was met with resistance. “It was like going from a speedboat to a cruise ship,” Glyman remarked. Atiyeh was more direct: “At the time, I was definitely frustrated as hell.”

After three years at Capital One, the pair left to launch Ramp in 2019. “We like the speedboat,” Glyman said.

Prioritizing Efficiency Over Traditional Growth Metrics

Ramp’s core mission is simple: help businesses save time and money. Glyman argues that the industry has traditionally done the opposite. “Corporate cards incentivized spending more,” he wrote in a company blog post. “Finance teams devoted most of their time to manual tasks and administrative processes. Legacy tools tracked spending but couldn’t efficiently prevent much at all.”

The company claims to have saved businesses $2 billion and 20 million hours since its inception, with half of those savings occurring in just the past year. While most software companies prioritize revenue growth, Ramp invests heavily in product development—allocating over 50% of its payroll to R&D, a figure significantly higher than industry norms.

This strategy has paid off. In 2024 alone, Ramp introduced 200 new features and three product lines. “At no time has it been better to be a Ramp customer,” Glyman said. “My job is to ensure the same is true 12 months from now. And every year after that.”

Efficiency isn’t glamorous, but it is critical for sustainable business growth. Glyman points to historical examples: Sam Walton reducing Walmart’s supply chain from five components to three, Henry Ford cutting car production time from 12 hours to 93 minutes. “We cut the cost to buy anything from 30 minutes to 30 seconds,” he said.

Ramp’s customers, including Poshmark, Anduril, Notion, and Cursor, cite efficiency as a key reason for using the platform. Poshmark reached its free cash flow goals five months early by reducing administrative workload, while Anduril streamlined financial processes to focus on product innovation.

The App Center

Recognizing the inefficiencies of disconnected financial tools, Ramp launched the App Center, a hub that integrates with over 200 apps and 75 technology partners, including NetSuite, Ironclad, and Puzzle.

The App Center automates routine financial tasks. Users can issue spending approvals through Slack, auto-code receipts in Gmail, and trigger purchase request reviews with Ironclad workflows. Troy Wright of Ironclad praised the integration, saying, “We’re proud to partner with Ramp, and believe the launch of the App Center will make that experience even more seamless.”

With this launch, Ramp aims to move beyond isolated financial management tools to create a unified system where finance teams can automate workflows across their entire tech stack.

Ramp Treasury

Ramp recently introduced Ramp Treasury, a service that allows businesses to store cash in a high-yield business account or a money market fund. Customers can earn 2.5% interest while maintaining liquidity for operational expenses.

“We looked at checking accounts and deposits that clients had linked to Ramp and realized that the vast majority were earning 0.00% interest,” Glyman told TechCrunch. The product is designed to complement, not replace, existing bank accounts. Ramp partners with First Internet Bank of Indiana for cash deposits and Apex for investment services.

Is An IPO Coming??

Ramp’s growth trajectory has been steep. The company recently completed a $150 million secondary share sale, nearly doubling its valuation to $13 billion. Investors include Stripes, GIC, Avenir Growth, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst.

The company has grown to serve over 30,000 customers and has doubled its enterprise business in the past year. Its payment volume has surged from $10 billion in early 2023 to $55 billion today. Notably, Ramp has maintained capital efficiency, burning less than $2 million per month on average in 2024.

“AI is fundamentally changing how businesses operate, and we’re ensuring our customers are at the forefront of this transformation,” Glyman said. He also acknowledged that Ramp is considering an IPO in the long term.

Ramp operates in a highly competitive space alongside companies like Brex, Mercury, Navan, and Mesh Payments. While Brex once pursued a bank charter before abandoning the effort, American Express CEO Steve Squeri remains confident in traditional players, noting that Amex’s loyalty programs and customer experience cater to business needs more effectively than fintechs focused solely on cashback incentives.