Corporate Card Fintech Ramp Earns Its Horn Following $115M Series B

Ramp, a fintech company that developed a corporate card designed to help businesses spend less, reached a unicorn status valuation of $1.6 billion after raising $115 million in Series B funding.

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Eric Glyman, Gene Lee and Karim Atiyeh co-founded the New York-based company in 2019 after building and scaling money-saving platform Paribus before selling it to Capital One in 2016.

Ramp went after new financing after experiencing heavy market excitement, demand from customers and interest from investors, company co-founder and CEO Glyman told Crunchbase News.

“When you look back 30 or 40 years, you can see how different the phone or the car was, and how our lives have changed today and how travel has changed, but credit cards are the same,” Glyman added. “Cards should have more intelligence. In the future, they will be smart enough, like automatically collect receipts, as well as help you get a better deal on software automatically. There is a lot of room for innovation.”

The new round of funding was led by D1 Capital Partners and Stripe, which were joined by Goldman Sachs, Founders Fund, Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, Redpoint Ventures, BoxGroup, Neo and Contrary Capital, as well as a group of angel investors. It brings the total venture and debt financing raised by Ramp to $320 million, according to Crunchbase data. This new funding also comes four months after announcing $30 million in Series A3 financing from D1 Capital and Coatue.

As for where that funding will be deployed, Glyman said 90 percent of customers are adopting Ramp as full-stop fund management, so he intends to continue scaling product development, sales, marketing and partnerships, as well as new features and payment capabilities such as automated savings and accounting and sophisticated card controls.

Hiring is another big area: Within the past month, Ramp also brought on former Stripe and Goldman Sachs executive Colin Kennedy as chief business officer.

“We are operating at the next level of scale, which includes Stripe coming on,” he added. “We’ve also been doubling our team every six months. We were 16 or 17 people at the beginning of 2020 and now have 64 people.”

Indeed, over the past six months Ramp grew its transaction volume by approximately 400 percent, and the volume is nearly a run rate of $1 billion annually, Glyman said. The company also touts having saved customers more than $10 million through its proprietary purchase cost-saving software.

Kareem Zaki, investor at Thrive Capital, knew Ramp co-founder Atiyeh from school and said he continued to stay close to Ramp as the company was being built. What stood out to Thrive the most was the product-focused team, as well as how the product was saving time and money, Zaki said in an interview.

“The corporate card is important, but more so is the integration, full-time sync and the financial products like loans and payments,” he added. “There is value to be created by unlocking new behaviors.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias