Bottom Line: Ramp's $30M funding round announced today reflects the significant results their clients are achieving using the startup's spend management platform to remove expense, spend and vendor management roadblocks, saving thousands of dollars in the process.
Using AI To Help Customers Accumulate More Dollars Not Points
Launched in 2019, Ramp provides an AI-based corporate credit card and spend management platform designed to help businesses break through the bottlenecks that stand in the way of saving more. Founder and CEO Eric Glyman, who sold his previous startup Paribus to Capital One, says that Ramp's idea began when he and the co-founders realized that innovating with software and AI-first could deliver significant savings and money back to businesses. "I think one of the biggest issues in the credit card industry, which is, so many funds go into sponsoring points programs, not into helping automate and help people get more out of each dollar," Eric said. Motivated by Ramp's many potential ways of turning data into savings for customers, the company launched its corporate card and spend management platform in 2019.
Using AI and machine learning to personalize savings strategies for each customer, including how to trim unneeded subscriptions, proved to be a compelling value proposition, all sizes of businesses acted on. Eric observed, "we started getting involved with businesses and saw a bit of a sad rule that the bigger businesses got, the less efficient, the more wasteful they got with their money." Ramp reached $100M in transaction volume faster than any other corporate card, seeing exponential growth in the last few months. The $30M funding round they received today from D1 Capital and Coatue Management brings their total funding to $50M since launch. Ramp's growth and success in attracting venture funding in a challenging economic environment further prove that their business model is prescient and signals the future of fintech, which is using AI and machine learning to deliver more savings to customers.
Bringing Order To Receipt Chaos Using AI
Keeping track of receipts and submitting them with expense reports is the greatest time-waster any corporate cardholder has today. From purchasing software subscriptions, services and supplies to paying contractors, keeping track of receipts to reconcile a corporate card wastes time. For small businesses where people have multiple jobs, tracking receipts can get chaotic.
Ramp immediately saw an opportunity to use AI and machine learning to bring order out of the receipt chaos so many businesses routinely go through. Because Ramp relies on the Visa network and Visa Zero Liability Guarantee, they process every transaction and provide clients with the flexibility to define algorithms that approve or deny every purchase. During a recent interview, Eric explained how Ramp automates the most time-consuming aspect of having a corporate card – providing readable, auditable receipts. "Because we're processing the transactions, we can approve or deny each one. We can text or email the cardholder, depending on if it was in person or online. When you still might have a receipt in your hand, you can text a photo of the receipt back and we automatically match that to the right receipt", Eric explained.
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