his fintech startup Ramp in February 2020, he expected the usual challenges of starting a new business: long hours, finding talent, marketing an unknown product. What he didn’t expect was for half of his New York City employees to fall mysteriously ill just a week after the company launched.
Corporate thriftiness is such a core tenet of Ramp’s pitch that its north star metric is how much it reduces a customer’s spend per year: 5% on average. Board member Keith Rabois, a partner at Khosla Ventures, predicts another milestone on the horizon — doubling the average savings of Ramp customers to 10%, sometime in the next “six to 18 months,” he toldNow Ramp, valued at $7.65 billion as of April, claims it’s the fastest growing corporate card in the U.S.
The company touts a high tech flair that traditional credit card companies don’t offer, like being able to issue special-purpose cards to individual employees with specific spending limits. Most of those software features are free, but for access to some premium services like supporting multiple currencies, the startup charges $15 per user per month for a package called Ramp Plus.
Ramp is banking on AI to fuel its growth in the future. Cofounder and CTO Karim Atiyeh sees Ramp’s moonshot as eventually creating AI agents to serve as executive assistants or business negotiators. “I'm looking forward to the day where I could just tell Ramp, ‘Book my flight back home.’ And it knows where home is, when my last meeting is, what the policy of my company is, it’s all taken care of,” Atiyeh said.But for now, they’re focused on the nuts and bolts of daily business.