Fintech Nexus interviewed Ramp co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman, who believes it should be robots chasing corporate expense receipts, not humans.
Eric Glyman, Ramp’s company’s co-founder and CEO, is literally counting the days — now around 2,300 of them — that Ramp has spent putting artificial intelligence agents to work automating expense reports and corporate card transactions so its customers don’t have to.
That investment is reaping benefits,including a $200 million Series E round, led by Founders Fund, in June at a $16 billion valuation. Since its founding in 2019, the company raised a total of $1.4 billion in equity financing.
Ramp is often compared to Brex, also a spend management company, as both started with corporate cards, and compete for capital and to carve out their own slice of the fintech pie.
In a wide-ranging email interview with Fintech Nexus, Glyman said Ramp differentiates itself by branching out into new areas, like travel and bill pay. The company also recently partnered with Stripe to add a stablecoin element to its corporate cards to facilitate cross-border transactions.
Glyman shared more on his plans for the new funding, where AI will be a major player for the company, and why automation will be a differentiator in financial operations and Ramp’s future.
Why is the use of AI agents good for Ramp?
AI agents let us deliver on our core mission to save companies time and money without them noticing. The best AI is invisible AI. Our agents chase receipts, auto-fill expense reports and forecast cash flow so humans can focus on building things that matter.
How does Ramp use them uniquely?
We use AI to connect the dots between context, money movement, and ideal business outcomes to deliver measurable impact. If you joined Ramp in 2023, you’re getting three times more work done per minute than when you started. Today, we have expense reports that do themselves, books that close themselves, and money that automatically finds its way to higher yield. Tomorrow, it’s fully self-driving software that doesn’t need to be managed but does the work for you.
How receptive are customers to using AI agents (or AI in general)?
While AI can sound futuristic, it’s really just about automation. Virtually all of the AI in the Ramp platform is invisible, quietly doing the work in the background. Customers are very receptive to it because it’s not something they have to actively think about. The work just happens.
Are you having to do a lot of education around that technology?
No, because the whole point is the work should happen automatically without you noticing. On top of that, we focus on creating simple user experiences. If you have to do a lot of education to get customers to know how to use your product, you’re not creating a great product.
You’ve said 40,000 businesses are using Ramp today. Tell me about the company’s traction over the past two years.
The traction has been incredible and humbling. We now process over $80 billion in annualized purchase volume, and our bill pay volume now surpasses our card volume on the platform. We’ve expanded from corporate cards into a full financial operations platform, and half our customers now use two or more products across procurement, travel, treasury and accounting automations. Most importantly, our customers are getting three times more work done per minute spent on Ramp than they were just two years ago. In addition, our revenue is growing faster than ever.
Why was it a good time to go after new funding?
While Ramp doesn’t need to raise capital, we have a unique opportunity to lean into our momentum even more as we deepen our AI capabilities, expand upmarket and advance internationally. It also allows us to deepen relationships with top investors and mark the stock to our progress.
What does it mean for the company to reach $16 billion in valuation?
It reflects the scale we’re operating at now. Customers from leading AI companies like Cursor to Fortune 500s like CBRE. It means we are saving companies more time and money than ever before: $10 billion and 27.5 million hours to date. AI and the drive for efficiency are massive tailwinds for us, and we’re moving faster than anyone else.
How do you think about liquidity for employees as your valuation continues to increase?
We’re thoughtful about creating opportunities for employees to get value from their equity, and have done so at various points of our journey. The new valuation sets a strong benchmark that increases confidence in the long-term value of employee equity.
How has the company’s ideal customer profile evolved as you’ve scaled and added new customers?
Our core customer profile hasn’t changed. We serve finance teams and companies obsessed with efficiency. From startups to family owned companies to leading enterprises, 40,000 businesses across every sector are choosing Ramp to reclaim their time and money.
Keeping up with corporate expenses probably still remains close to the top of things employees don’t want to do. How is Ramp continuing to make it something they don’t mind doing now?
Our goal isn’t to make something they don’t mind, it’s to eliminate the need for manual expense reports entirely. For example, we’ve doubled the percentage of expense reports that complete themselves without any human intervention. And our AI auto-fills memos and categories as soon as a swipe clears.
What are you keeping your eye on as it relates to the financial operations market?
The market is still incredibly fragmented. It’s common to see companies juggling 20 different finance tools, which creates inefficiency and manual work. There’s a clear trend toward consolidation and automation, driven by companies that are obsessed with operational efficiency. The winners will be the businesses that embrace full financial operations automation rather than just adding more point solutions. It’s a massive market opportunity that’s still largely untapped.
Are most competitors following Ramp or are they trying to differentiate in another way?
I can’t speak to competitors’ plans, but what differentiates us is measurable impact. We’re the only company that actually measures time and money savings for customers. And unusually compared to what is normally seen, we’re growing faster at a larger scale. That’s true across the board, from revenue to customers and product releases.
Where is the future of Ramp headed?
Our mission hasn’t changed: save companies time and money. What’s exciting is the scale of opportunity ahead. We’re still only serving 1.5% of the U.S. market, so there’s massive room to grow. The future is about taking what we’ve built and expanding it to serve millions more companies globally, while deepening our AI capabilities so we can automate more of the financial workflow.
