How Ramp's Eric Glyman Built a $22.5 Billion Startup in 2,367 Days

0:00This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. A billion in revenue and then a$22.5 billion valuation. Is the mass massing? Are we in some something like valuation hype cycle?

0:39What is happening? How does that work? Over the last year, we've just about doubled revenue. And so the velocity that we are growing at combined with the scale of the company is part of what's getting investors so excited. Ramp CEO Eric Glyman is the architect behind one of fintech's fastest climbs. Going fast, I think, is fun. I think there's an appeal you figure out if you're right along quick. Within three years of its launch, Ramp hit$100 million in annual revenue. And just a few years later, the financial operations platform crossed$1 billion in annualized revenue. Investors have taken notice.

1:12This summer, Ramp was valued at$16 billion. And just six weeks later, that number shot up to$22.5 billion. Ramp's rise stems from flipping the industry's incentives on their head. Instead of rewarding customers for spending more, Ramp is designed to help companies spend less. Since inception, we've helped our customers spend$10 billion less than they would have otherwise spent and automated 27.5 million hours of work. I sat down with Glyman at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech Conference in Park City, Utah to talk about valuations, hyperscale, AI-powered finance, and how a startup born just six years ago is rewriting the playbook for corporate spending.

1:54All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Eric, thank you so much for being with us here today. And at a big moment in time for Ramp, you are one of the hottest startups. You raised at a$16 billion valuation over the summer, and then like eight weeks later raised at a$22.5 billion valuation. You just crossed a billion in annualized revenue, 45 ,000 customers. So a lot going on. But first, I want to just talk about that number. You look at like a billion in revenue and then a 22.5 billion valuation. Is the mass massing? Are we in some sort of like valuation hype cycle? What is happening? How does that work?

2:33You know, I think Ramp is just growing so unbelievably quickly. Over the last year, we've just about doubled revenue. The fastest growing public software companies, for reference, you know, expect and hope to grow something like 20 to 30 percent over the next year. And so the velocity that we are growing at combined with the scale of the company is part of what's getting investors so excited. But beyond it, I think the unusual part is Ramp is actually growing even faster this year and doing it while generating cash flow than we did last year. And so when you combine that last with the sheer scale of the market, you know, there's over two trillion dollars spent in the United States on corporate and small business cards, which is just one of our markets.

3:14And we're something like one and a half percent of that market, it's hard not to get excited about the potential ahead. Co-founded in 2019 by Eric Glyman, Kareem Attia and Jean Lee, Ramp quickly became one of the fastest growing corporate card and spend management platforms in the United States. Instead of rewarding companies for spending more, Ramp positioned itself around saving them money, a strategy that resonated during the pandemic when budgets were under pressure. Early on, the founders zeroed in on a major frustration, expense reports. In February 2020, they rolled out a tool that automated the process.

3:47When an employee uses a ramp card, the expenses either log directly from transaction data or the employee gets a text requesting a receipt. That innovation helped fuel ramps rise, propelling it to generate$100 million in annual revenue in just three years. We were put on this earth to do expense reports and keep books, but everyone's paying for it. Everyone has an hourly rate. And if you can go and take that work and automate it away for an organization, that adds a lot. when you start thinking about what's the, you know, what is the value of everyone's hour. Beyond its physical and digital cards, Ramp has since expanded into a full suite of tools for expenses, bill pay, and financial workflows, replacing the patchwork of cards and software many companies still juggle.

4:27But its core business remains interchange fees. The cut Ramp takes on each transaction. Today, the company says it serves more than 45 ,000 businesses and generates more than$1 billion in annualized revenue, all while maintaining positive cash flow. But still, it only reaches 1 % of Fortune 500 companies. Hyperscale has been in your bones since even the company pre-launch phase. You and your co-founder, Kareem, sat down together and you said, we want to try and create a unicorn company, which is a billion-dollar valuation, within 18 months. No company in New York had ever done that before. Why is that such an ambitious goal?

5:05but you manifested a billion-dollar company because you did it. Within 18 months, I think you were there. And with two years, you had, what, like$100 million in revenue run rate about? That's exactly right. From two years, less than two years from incorporation, Ramp had been valued at not just$1 billion, but$1.5. Within two years of the launch of the company, we surpassed over$100 million in revenue. And just a few years later, last month, we just passed over$1 billion in revenue. For us, I think it's two things. First, you hit on this aspect of speed. We're religious about it. We count the days.

5:42We're 2 ,367 days old. Well, you know exactly how many days old Ramp is. We do. Why? I think it creates this urgency. I was always inspired. I think about leaders like Frank Slootman, who wrote Amp It Up and just talks about the default state of an organization. if unless someone is driving and leaders are creating tempo, things slow to a halt, the expectation is you decelerate. And it's easy to say, you know what, why not Monday instead of doing it on Friday? We want to instill that urgency to say, you know, today is the only, you know, day 2 ,367 we're going to have. We're going to make it count.

6:17And also too, when every day you're thinking about what do we get done over the last 30 days, over the last 60, you can measure and you can start to make trade-offs and constraints and you can say, okay, when I look at these, in my last month, these activities really mattered, moved us forward. Let's do more of those. And these other things, even though I liked it, were not as impactful. I have to say no to these things so we can grow faster. And so that's a big part of it. The last and other important reason for us is our whole mission is help our customers spend less. We want the same for our own customer.

6:48That's kind of a novel idea. I mean, and I want to talk about that too, just the idea for Ramp and explaining it to make sure everybody understands, but it's flipping the incentive structure on its head of the way that corporate credit cards have traditionally worked, where it's like the more you spend, the more points you get, you're encouraged to spend more. You actually want people to spend less, which actually seems like it sounds like a bad business. Is that a business that's viable? Well, it's some of the largest companies in the world are in this line of business. You look at J.P. Morgan Chase, an over$800 billion company, American Express, $230 billion company, proving that you can do great by getting people to spend.

7:26Now, I sold my last company to Capital One and I learned how this industry worked, what made it great. But I found it so deeply strange that at the core, customers were working to make the banks just a little bit worse off by gaming the reward systems. And the banks were incentivized to go and devalue the reward system to convince people the points were worth a lot and then devalue it in the background. And we just thought this is a massive opportunity. What if actually we wanted the same things for customers? And what if our goal was not to go and, you know, give them the minimum points, but actually just help them spend less?

8:01You can compete on value, how much better than you make your business, not competing on price, who's giving away more. And so, you know, I think that was the other motivation in attacking this industry. We believed, we didn't know if it would be us, but we thought at the end of the day, this is how the industry should settle with companies working to make their customers better off and customers genuinely choosing the provider that's helping them grow. And I think that's been the big secret behind Ramp's rapid growth. So you were not the first startup in this space. There was another competitor and still is another competitor, Brex, which has a valuation much lower than yours.

8:37But it was the first mover, I guess you could say. And at your point of launch, it was already a unicorn. So how have you just plotted along despite having this big competitor in the space taking venture capital away potentially and just surpassed them, frankly, in all the measures? Yeah, we were accused a lot in our early days of being, you know, the second mover. We always thought we were like the 150th mover in this. You know, when you think about companies, you know, most of the juggernauts in this country, you know, they started 175 years ago. Their founders quite literally wore top hats.

9:15And so it didn't bother us so much to come, you know, a little top hat. You need a top hat. We'll work on it. We'll talk with the styling team. But look, when we approached this industry, it didn't bother us to come into this a little bit later. Our view was this was a large industry that was not aligned with the end customers. And also, when your founders maybe wore top hats, I think the importance of time isn't something you're thinking about every day. You've been around for as long as you've been alive. You'll probably be around. And so what's the hurry? We looked at these great companies in the valley, whether it was the last generation and still very present, the Metas, the Ubers, the Move Fast, create technology quickly.

9:56And it was so at odds with the financial institutions where if you were transported back in time and you had to use the bank accounts or the credit cards of 50 years ago, you'd probably be fine. But if you had to use the phones from 50 years ago, you and I couldn't do our jobs. and it just drove home of there was very little product innovation. And so one of the things we set out to do in starting Ramp was we have got to be first aligned with our customer, help them spend less, be more successful as a business, had to be priority number one. And then number two, we would try to build this valley type like company that is iterating very quickly, that is measuring in days, that is shipping products every single day.

10:36We ship more products this year than there are business days, more features and announcements. And the goal that when you do that, the experience of how much time the product saves just expands and compounds faster. And so we're trying to catch up what I think the financial services industry should have delivered over the last 50 years. We're going to try to do in just a handful and actually make our customers' businesses better because it matters. Like many players in corporate finance, Ramp is betting on AI to drive its next wave of growth. From the start, Ramp embraced early AI tools to sift through emails and card data, mapping how employees and companies spend.

11:09This ultimately helped businesses find new ways to cut costs. But over the past few years, Ramp has steadily built its suite of automated financial services for corporate clients. We're talking about agents. Agents. AI agents. AI. AI agents. In July, it introduced its first customer-facing AI feature, Policy Agents. As you're looking at the product integration, you didn't start out as an AI company, but would you say you're an AI company now? How are you using it to make Ramp more efficient and your customers more efficient? Is it actually working in a measurable way? For sure. So first, you know, when you think about our customers base, we support over 45 ,000 companies of all shapes and sizes from family farms to the Fortune 500.

11:51But for the majority, especially the small and midsize businesses, you know, they don't have a single engineer at the company, let alone an engineer working to make their finance department modern, adopt AI, all of that. Here at Ramp, we spend over 50 % of our R &D budget, of our payroll on R &D, on engineering, on data science, on design, all focused with integrating the latest and greatest technology so that even if you're a small business, you are benefiting from what's happening in these research labs. And so one of the ways that it shows up for a customer is if you go and you tap a card at the store, you will get a text from Ramp.

12:29You snap a photo of the receipt and we automatically match it to the right transactions. We auto-complete the accounting category. And what today most people are used to expenses being the worst hour of their month of very painful, takes a lot of work on Ramp. You snap a photo and you're done. The entire expense experience takes like 10 seconds. And since for most of our customers, they're not necessarily thinking I'm buying an AI expense report. It's just an easier way to do business. And it happens to be that AI is how every single step is being sped up along the process. Does that make sense?

13:02Yeah, it does. And do you feel like the companies are benefiting on the other end from the AI efficiencies you're able to provide? There's all these studies out or there's one in particular that people keep talking about in MIT where like all these corporate pilots are failing. And actually, people are failing to be able to generate more revenue thanks to AI, more efficiencies from a monetary perspective. And so I'm curious, just like, has RAMP increased its revenue because of AI? And can you prove that you're increasing companies' revenue because of AI? I love that you asked this question. I think so one of the things that's very unique in our industry, I think we're the first and I still believe we're the only industry to actually measure how much money and how much time have we actually saved our customers.

13:49Since inception, we've helped our customers spend$10 billion less than they would have otherwise spent and automated 27 and a half million hours of work. When you look at the average company, though, we actually are able to help companies reduce their expenses by over 5 % per year. Compare that to a rewards program. There's not enough interchange to fund more than, you know, on the order of two-ish percent of a rebate. We are saving customers dramatically more than what's possible. And when you look at kind of the history of the company, when you first covered a ramp when we launched in 2020, we thought we could help the average company cut their expense by 2%.

14:25That's well over five today in large part because AI is starting to go and complete the expense to do the books and accounting, to go and move money to higher yield, it's able to actually not just suggest, but to go and take action as a part of the process. And so, you know, I think there's a lot of companies out there selling AI services, but aren't measuring the results. There's a lot of companies selling you rewards, aren't thinking about the impact on the bottom line. Ramp from the jump has been focused on what is the ROI? What is the impact that we're driving religious on measuring and reporting that out?

14:59And I think that's part of why our net promoter score is in the 60s. It's comparable to an Apple. And I think that a lot of companies that are struggling now with all the AI they've sold that people aren't feeling so great about having the buyer's remorse didn't start with that simple insight as they should be thinking about what is the outcome they're driving and how do you measure it from the start. And are you using AI to also kind of fight AI? Because I saw a story the other day about how there's now these AI receipts that look very much like real receipts. And, you know, all of our employees are very trustworthy, but there might be a bad egg throwing in some AI receipts in there.

15:37Can you catch that? Like, how are you thinking about blocking AI initiatives that went harder and harder to prove if something's real, like an expense? There's a variety of ways. So first, when it was earlier this year, it was one of the newer GPT-4 models came out and suddenly was clear It was very easy for people to go and generate AI receipts. We partnered with the leading labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others first to create detection systems. But we have a repository of over 100 million receipts that we can look at of valid receipts. And so we actually have systems that we're using AI to fight AI to go and block these transactions.

16:16It's something regular systems can do. And next, because we have multiple sources of truth, we have the card and merchant data. We have the image data. We have the receipt data with the accounting data. We are much better than single systems like maybe a expensifier concur where you just get an image. And that's the only thing you have to go on because we have multiple sources of identifying through this transaction occur. It's much easier for us to detect what this receipt says the amount was or the way the LLM generated that receipt looks different than these one million other receipts we have for this merchant.

16:49That's one large way. The second large way, and I think a lot of waste happens and fraud happens because managers are too busy. You know, when you take a hundred thousand person organization, a lot of people are spending time is probably in this audience going and checking, you know, for your employee. Should I approve or deny this expense? But the reality is you're busy of another job. You probably just hit approve. We've trained large language models to actually read your policy in depth. It probably has read it better than anyone in this room. It's audited and seen every expense. And we are able, our policy agents are able to actually go and automatically approve 90 % of transactions from the jump, 5 % to 10 % that need attention.

17:31We can show you why it was in or out of policy. It's 99 % accurate, which is about 10 times more accurate than the average employee. And what it means is it's a massive time saver. It's saving managers from this time in reviews, but it's also catching a lot of things that people would not catch. people spending companies' money that in the old world would have just gone through because no one had the time to look at it. And as you're building all these tools that are AI capable and efficiency and time and money saving can also equate in a worker's mind to my job. Is that my job you're coming for, Eric?

18:08So I'm curious how you're thinking about, like in the most honest way, The bigger vision for if Ramp is really successful in saving companies time and money, what will that do to traditional business functions? Do CEOs need a whole finance department? If all goes to plan, do they need a human resources department even eventually? A lot of the core business functions, operations, like is that the grand vision? And, you know, I don't know if I don't believe that AI is smart enough to do the job of a CFO or a complete finance function, but it is definitely capable of doing your expense reports. It is definitely capable of categorizing transactions.

18:50And I think for most people, I don't think you're adding deep human intelligence when you're going and snapping a photo and you're describing what you bought and you're going and tagging transactions. It's very low level work. And for most people, like it is just the worst hour of your month. Why not automate these terrible parts of your job away? And it allows your best salespeople to go and spend that last hour selling on actually doing the work they were meant to do. And so we're very much in that phase of actually it's creating a lot of delight and joy for people in their roles. I think when you kind of abstract it and you look more long term, you think about like, what is the finance function?

19:26Where are people spending time? And at least on the spend side, a lot of it's really just algorithms. them. It's going and determining who should spend what under what circumstances. Once the spend has occurred, how do I categorize it correctly? That takes a lot of work. And then based on what happens, how do I goal seek to a better outcome the next time? So much of the finance function today, I would argue on the order of 80 % of it is actually looking backwards. It's trying to figure out what did we do? What did we spend on? What's happening in the business? It's not asking the interesting questions that most people in finance got in to do, which is, you know, how do I make this business better?

20:01How do we spend on the things that matter? Where is value? How do I allocate capital better? And I really am a firm believer of like, I think that the, you know, the low level and work that people don't want to do, I think will go away. But I believe and I'm fairly optimistic that actually when you can go and your books are keeping themselves, money is finest way to higher yield. One for businesses, you're going to have a lot more at the end of the day. For the average American business, they have an 8 % profit margin. If you can go and grow it even by 1%, it's equivalent mathematically to a 12 % increase in revenue.

20:35And so I just think that bottom line impact to create more margin, to invest more is going to be profound. And second, I think for people, the work is going to be more interesting. And so at least as far ahead as I can see and imagine, that's what I see. But, you know, we're just excited to be working on it. Looking ahead, Ramp's challenge is figuring out how to keep its rapid growth going. I love that you guys manifested a unicorn. Like, it's so ridiculous that you were like, we're going to do this in 18 months, guys. It's never been done before. But yeah, it's like, here it comes. Right now, it only controls about 1.5 % of the$2 trillion corporate and small business credit card market in the United States.

21:09A tiny slice compared to giants like Amex. Of the 45 ,000 customers you guys have, how many are like really big, like Fortune 500? Yeah, I think, you know, we have something like about 1 % of the Fortune 500. and I'm sitting at that using Ramp in some ways. The company took off by focusing on small and mid-sized businesses, teaming up with venture and private equity firms to cut costs at their portfolio companies. But breaking into larger businesses is a tougher climb. Gleiman says it's within reach, pointing to big-name clients like CBRE and Shopify. What's it like to be the hot girl on campus?

21:42How frothy is it out there? And were you surprised by some of the investor behavior you've seen, given your last company only raised$2 million, and now you've raised over a billion, slightly different. So what's it like out there to be a fundraising startup that every investor seems to want to have a piece of? It is, I think for investors, I empathize certainly on the venture industry. There's more investors than ever. And I think that there's - There are, everyone's a VC. It seems like it. It's a part-time fund for you to invest too. There is a lot of capital and I think people are looking to find yield.

22:18And some of this is, I think it speaks to the world is changing faster than ever. I think that the way, like we are in a world now where computers can see and hear and think and reason, and that's bizarre and has all sorts of profound implications. And I think we are in some sense in a, you know, in the world, multi-trillion dollar jump balls in lots of industries. And I think that the stakes are very high. And that's part of why companies are, people are looking to invest. I'd also say that companies are growing faster than they ever have before. This company is seven years ago. Is that because there's so much money slashing around?

22:51Like, why is now the moment that we're just like the numbers you're hitting seem unfathomable from even a few years ago? One, I think that AI is making people more productive. But two, I just think that when companies are able to grow and Ramp is doing this, you know, while generating cash, you know, at an unprecedented scale, VCs look at this and said, how could I not invest at it? Because if you're doubling, you know, each year at this kind of scale, within months, that round that looked expensive proved to be cheap and inexpensive. And so I think that's part of what's driving this demand. And so there's fewer companies that are growing faster than ever.

23:32But I even think about another company, Cognition. It's a wonderful company that, you know, started on Ramp, Cursors, another one. You know, these organizations are not yet two years old, but are doing nine figures of revenue. And part of this is they are capturing the moment and selling new types of services. But the other part of it is, you know, their finance teams are benefiting from incredible technology that in the old world they would have needed. I think it just would have been much tougher to kind of build up the skills inside of the company to deal with this growth. And so I just think the tools for builders are better now than ever before.

24:07Does it ever make you nervous to be like, I started this company 2 ,300 whatever days ago and I'm worth$22.5 billion? Like the fulfilling on that, and especially if an IPO is on the horizon, then you're going to be answering to investors. Anxiety? Excitement? Anxiety though? Like, I mean, in my vid 30s, you know, I think you always look up to people, many in this room who've been building great organizations and wanted to be that one day. And so, you know, I feel very, very lucky to have the opportunity to do this and to be able to work on something that I'm really passionate about. But for me, look, I think valuations in some sense are, I think they're a derivative.