Ramp Secures $500M Funding, Hits $22.5B Valuation with AI-Driven Financial Automation

Ramp hits $22.5B valuation just 45 days after reaching $16B | TechCrunch

Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of expense management startup Ramp, announced on Wednesday a fresh $500 million raise at a whopping $22.5 billion post-money valuation. This new round, led by Iconiq Growth with participation from Founders Fund and D1 Capital Partners, comes just 45 days after Ramp's last round. In June, Ramp raised $200 million at a $16 billion valuation, and that was a leap over the $13 billion valuation Ramp announced in March. In his blog post, Glyman laid out his vision for AI agent-led "autonomous finance" that he predicts will be the norm by 2028. To this end, Ramp just launched its first agent with plans to launch more. Ramp has now raised $1.9 billion total. The company became cash-flow positive earlier this year, it told TechCrunch. In March, Glyman told us Ramp had hit annualized revenue of $700 million. It currently claims 40,000 customers.

Fueled By AI, Fintech Ramp Raises $500M at a $22.5B Valuation Just Weeks After Last Raise

Expense management startup Ramp has raised another round of capital -- a $500 million Series E-2 at a $22.5 billion valuation, the company confirmed to Crunchbase News on Wednesday. The raise comes weeks after Ramp announced it had raised $200 million in a Series E round at a valuation of $16 billion. Iconiq Capital led the financing, which included participation from existing backers Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Stripe, Citi, Lux Capital and Sequoia Capital, among others. New backers include Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures), T. Rowe Price and Operator Collective, among others. The pace at which Ramp has raised capital and grown its business makes it a standout in a fintech space that has been on a roller coaster ride in recent years. In early March, Ramp announced it had nearly doubled its valuation to $13 billion after a $150 million secondary share sale. This means that the company has nearly doubled its valuation in less than five months. Since its 2019 inception, New York-based Ramp says it has now raised a total of $1.9 billion in equity funding. Notably, the company revealed today that it has over 40,000 customers, including Shopify, Anduril Industries, Notion and Cursor, and that it "began generating cash flow earlier this year." Earlier this month, Ramp launched what it described as the "first of many" autonomous AI agents in a move it claims helps its customers "catch 15x more policy violations." In a blog post, CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman wrote: "Right now, Ramp users are getting 3× more done per minute compared to two years ago. By 2027 -- as our agents start working in parallel -- we're aiming for 30×." He added: "45 days ago: I said, "Let the robots chase receipts." And we raised $200M to do just that. Today, they're not just chasing receipts. They're filing your expenses, booking your travel, paying your invoices, and closing your books. And we've raised another $500M at a $22.5 billion valuation to pick up the pace." In announcing the financing, Ramp did not disclose hard revenue figures. However, the company crossed $700 million in annualized revenue as of January of this year, sources previously told TechCrunch. Ramp's biggest revenue generator is earning interchange fees from its cards. It also makes money through transaction fees on bill payments, SaaS revenue via its Plus offering, foreign exchange from global money movement, and affiliate fees through its travel product, among other things.

Weeks after its last funding round, fintech startup Ramp raises another $500M - SiliconANGLE

Weeks after its last funding round, fintech startup Ramp raises another $500M Ramp Business Corp., a provider of corporate credit cards and accounting software, today announced that it has raised $500 million in fresh funding. ICONIQ led the Series E-2 round with contributions from nearly two dozen other investors. Alphabet Inc.'s GV fund and Khosla Ventures were among the participants. Ramp's total outside funding now stands at about $2 billion. The company's latest round values it at $22.5 billion, which represents an increase of $8 billion in under two months. Ramp announced its previous $200 million raise in mid-June. Between the two investments, it debuted a set of artificial intelligence agents designed to automate manual work for accounting teams. In the enterprise, the process of approving business expenses can be highly time-consuming because there are many transactions to review. Ramp says that its AI agents perform the task automatically. When a worker makes a purchase, the AI agents compare the transaction against internal reimbursement policies and approve it if it meets all the necessary criteria. Ramp launched in 2019 with a focus on providing corporate credit cards. It continues to offer those cards alongside its newly introduced AI software. They provide features that enable accounting teams to monitor employee purchases, as well as set supplier-specific spending limits. Ramp says that its cards provide access to more than $350,000 worth of discounts and other offers. OpenAI, for example, provides up to $2,500 in application programming interface credits to startups. There are also offers from cloud providers, delivery companies and other firms. In January, Ramp expanded its product portfolio with a service called Treasury. It enables companies to open deposit accounts in which they can store funds to cover operating expenses. There are also investment accounts that offer a higher interest rate. On occasion of today's funding milestone, Ramp disclosed that Treasury already manages more than $1 billion in customer funds. For finance teams, the company provides software tools that automate tasks such as account reconciliation. That's the task of checking a company's accounting data for inconsistencies. Ramp also provides procurement tools that ease tasks such as renewing software-as-a-service subscriptions. In March, sources told TechCrunch that the company's annualized recurring revenue had topped $700 million. Ramp says that its customer base includes more than 40,000 organizations. The company claims to have saved more than 27.5 million hours of manual work for those organizations' employees with its automation features. "Right now, Ramp users are getting 3x more done per minute compared to two years ago," Ramp co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Eric Glyman wrote in a blog post today. "By 2027 - as our agents start working in parallel - we're aiming for 30x." Ramp will use the proceeds from its latest funding round to accelerate its product development efforts. In the coming months, the company plans to release new AI agents for automating account reconciliation and procurement tasks.

Ramp closes second raise in 45 days as AI fuels growth

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. Iconiq led the round, joined by all participants from the June Series E as well as a host of new backers, including Lightspeed Ventures and Google Ventures. Founded in 2019 as a corporate card, Ramp has evolved into a comprehensive system of operations for finance teams. Last year, it launched procurement, travel and treasury product lines. It now serves more than 40,000 companies and powers over $80 billion in annualised purchase volume across card transactions and bill payments. To date, the firm claims to has saved customers $10 billion and 27.5 million hours. In a letter to customers, CEO Eric Glyman makes clear that Ramp is going big on AI, noting that the firm has just launched its first AI agents which, by next year, will "take over the busywork" and by 2028 there will be autonomous. Referencing the previous raise, he writes: "45 days ago: I said 'Let the robots chase receipts'. And we raised $200M to do just that. "Today, they're not just chasing receipts. They're filing your expenses, booking your travel, paying your invoices, and closing your books. And we've raised another $500M at a $22.5 billion valuation to pick up the pace."

Ramp Raises $500 Million to Fund Financial Automation AI Agent | PYMNTS.com

The company, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) for financial automation, achieved that valuation after raising $500 million in its latest funding round, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Wednesday (July 30). The funds will help Ramp hire engineers, product experts and marketing and sales staff who focus on building and selling Ramp's AI agents, Co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman told the WSJ. Those agents help corporate finance teams automate things like expense report compliance, with future versions set to assist with procurement and bookkeeping, Glyman said. "Functionally, we're teaching software to think like people," he said, adding that the future of corporate finance will feature significantly more automation. The WSJ report notes that the funding round is happening in tandem with the rapid growth of AI agents, autonomous bots that can carry out tasks on behalf of humans. Ramp deployed its first AI agent earlier this month, and says thousands of customers have since signed on to try it. Among them is Richard Gobea, a finance manager at Quora, who said the question-and-answer website uses the agent to automate the work of an entry-level accountant or clerk who normally checks worker expenses against a corporate policy document. "I'm spending my time digging in a little more on the expenses the AI agent is flagging," he said. Despite the potential benefits of using AI agents, the risks are even starker, PYMNTS wrote recently. A growing number of voices are calling for restraint in agents' deployment, including Trustly Chief Legal and Compliance Officer Kathryn McCall. "You're messing with people's money here," she said in a recent for the June edition of the "What's Next in Payments" series, "What's Next in Payments: Secret Agent." "This is a lot different from using an AI agent to plan your vacation in Paris," McCall added. Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence finds trust issues are holding back businesses from using agentic AI, with 80% of high-automation enterprises citing data security and privacy as their chief concern with the technology. "Unlike traditional automation tools, agentic systems may involve dynamic decision-making across multiple systems, requiring permissions and credentials that can span departments or functions," PYMNTS wrote. "Misconfigurations, insufficient access controls, or opaque decision paths can elevate the likelihood of a data breach or policy violation." Ramp's Series E-2 funding round was led by Iconiq Growth, which is also reportedly leading Anthropic's latest fundraising effort which would value that AI startup at $170 billion.

Fintech Ramp secures US$22.5 billion valuation in late-stage funding round

Ramp said on Wednesday a late-stage funding round led by investment firm ICONIQ valued the fintech at US$22.5 billion, as it aims to accelerate its AI agent rollout with the fresh capital. The fintech sector is showing early signs of a rebound with a string of late-stage deals and exits after a years-long funding slump. New York-based Ramp, which offers corporate cards, payment services and expense management applications, was last valued at US$16 billion after it raised US$200 million at a Series E funding round in June. The company raised US$500 million in the latest Series E-2 round, taking its total equity financing to US$1.9 billion. The round saw participation from venture capital firms such as Founders Fund, GIC, Coatue, Thrive Capital and General Catalyst. Founded in 2019, Ramp enables tens of billions in purchases annually. It caters to more than 40,000 companies, including commercial real estate firm CBRE and defense technology company Anduril. Earlier this month, the company had launched its first autonomous artificial intelligence agents, which help clients in flagging fraud, updating policies as well as reviewing and approving transactions. "We're focused on ensuring our only constraint is the scale of our ambition," Ramp Chief Financial Officer Will Petrie said. The company said it began generating cash flow earlier this year. ---