Calvin Lee had his pick of jobs. A former silver medalist in the International Olympiad in Informatics, Lee had racked up internships at prominent institutions from Jane Street to Google during his three years at MIT. By the spring of 2019, he was juggling offers from Citadel and other hedge funds that would have made him a multimillionaire before he was old enough to rent a car.
But then Lee got a call from Karim Atiyeh, his former boss at a tiny fintech startup called Paribus, where he had interned for a month as a freshman.
Paribus had been acquired by Capital One, and Atiyeh and his cofounder, Eric Glyman, had been working for the credit card giant long enough to realize there was significant dissatisfaction among corporate customers—and a huge opportunity. They were starting a new company, called Ramp, to build a better, more efficient generation of corporate cards.
Atiyeh asked Lee to join as a founding engineer. And then came the bold claim: He promised Lee that Ramp would become a unicorn—a billion-dollar-valuation company—within two years.
Lee took the gamble. Exactly two years later, in April 2021, Ramp announced a Series B funding round that valued the young startup at $1.6 billion. Lee jokes that it was lucky he hadn’t done his research; no New York–based tech company had ever grown its valuation that quickly. “Sometimes it’s best not to know the odds,” he wrote on Twitter at the time.
Atiyeh and Glyman had taken their own risky bet by leaving senior positions at a Fortune 500 company in their mid-twenties. But their business model, with its laser focus on saving money, proved to be a perfect fit for the corporate mood as the COVID pandemic sent companies scrambling for cost-cutting options. After gaining early support from venture capitalist Keith Rabois and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, their proposition took off, propelling Ramp to an astonishing $100 million run rate three years after it started.
Today, Atiyeh’s unicorn promise to Lee looks almost quaint. The six-year-old startup just broke $1 billion in annualized revenue in August, and it now claims more than 45,000 businesses as customers. Over the past few years, Ramp has steadily built its suite of automated financial services for corporate clients. And Ramp’s promise that AI can make those services more powerful has enabled it to reach escape velocity, with one of the most daring one-two punches in venture funding this side of OpenAI. In July, just one month after announcing a Series E led by Founders Fund that valued Ramp at $16 billion, Glyman revealed a fresh Series E-2, led by Iconiq—valuing the company at a whopping $22.5 billion.
Software companies aiming to reduce the drudgery of back-office tasks don’t usually become household names like Uber or ChatGPT, but Ramp, inexplicably, is well on its way. (The company cemented that status this February with the ultimate flex of startup self-confidence: a Super Bowl ad.) Having proved it can play with the big kids in cards and financial management, Ramp is now pursuing a more ambitious project: rewiring how companies spend. Ramp accounts for about 1.5% of the $2 trillion corporate and small-business credit card market in the U.S., but Glyman is setting his sights on leapfrogging American Express, the 175-year-old financial juggernaut that accounts for around a third of corporate credit card volume.
The fact that Ramp can realistically consider such goals, just six years into its existence, is a telling snapshot of how quickly startups can ascend in a business climate increasingly obsessed with efficiency. Rapid improvements in technology have enabled Glyman and Atiyeh to execute on their fintech idea with remarkable speed. Meanwhile, the corporate world’s ever-growing need to prove it can turn such tech into meaningful, money-saving changes is generating feverish demand from customers and investors alike. Through an embrace of AI-powered automation and coffers filled with billions in venture funding, Ramp is taking full advantage. “Banks are selling money,” Glyman tells Fortune. “At our core, we’re selling time.”
The first attempt
Glyman grew up in Las Vegas as the city’s sprawl was creeping farther into the desert. “People took dirt lots and built stuff,” he recalls. “There were new parts of town all the time.” Those surroundings imbued Glyman with a restless streak that stayed with him even as he took a more traditional academic path out east to Harvard.
The unpleasant transition to the freezing climate of Cambridge put Glyman on a collision course with his future cofounder, Atiyeh, who had grown up in Lebanon. They met while huddling outside on campus, both sporting heavy Canada Goose jackets, during Glyman’s second year. And they stayed in touch when both moved to New York after graduation for jobs in finance.
Both quickly found themselves chafing in their bureaucratic and corporate workplaces, and both were obsessed with startups: They would read Hacker News and TechCrunch, meeting up at the gyms in each other’s apartment buildings to work out and trade ideas. Eventually, one stuck.
In the summer of 2013, Glyman and Atiyeh joined a few friends in planning a vacation in Puerto Rico—then found that the group members had paid different rates for the same flight, having booked on different days. Glyman, poring through the fine print on JetBlue’s website, found a policy that earned his friends $800 back. The pitch immediately came to him: a service that monitored price drops and secured refunds, taking a small cut in return.
The duo launched the company, which they named Paribus, meaning “all else equal” in Latin, in 2014, and it established Glyman and Atiyeh as rising stars in the New York fintech scene. In just over a year, Paribus had hockey-stick growth, from a few hundred users to more than 700,000, appearing on Good Morning America and earning a spot at the prestigious Y Combinator incubator (after an initial rejection).
Still, the startup was losing runway and fending off cease-and-desist letters from irate retailers. When Capital One approached Glyman and Atiyeh about a partnership, conversations morphed into an acquisition offer, which they finalized in October 2016—negotiating an exit in the “mid-eight figures,” Glyman says, and taking jobs at the company.
Glyman took to his new role as a credit card executive. His nice-guy vibe is so far from the archetype of inflated-ego founders that it confounds his friends, coworkers, and investors. Glyman’s interpersonal superpower is listening, which he performs with genuine zeal, head slightly cocked, ingesting information that he’ll tuck away and pull back out days or weeks later.
But underneath it all is a relentless drive, which Glyman calls his “divine dissatisfaction.” In one conversation, he evoked the famous documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about an aging chef singularly focused on delivering the greatest meal possible. Nik Koblov, Ramp’s head of engineering, said the joke around the office is that Glyman is a “hammer wrapped in velvet.” “It’s very disarming,” Koblov added.
Atiyeh—who has a more brusque and playful air—had less patience; he was relegated to the tech side, which he felt was not a priority at the company. Both missed the rush of a startup, and the duo started talking about ideas again.
Glyman was conducting user interviews with cardholders, who kept repeating the same points: They wanted savings, not rewards points. Why weren’t there credit cards that helped them focus on spending less? “That was gnawing at us for a long time,” Glyman says. They had a noncompete from Capital One on the consumer side, so the conclusion was obvious: They would build Paribus for business.
The rise of Ramp
Venture investors love talking about a wedge—a narrow product that companies use to pry open a broader market. Amazon first sold books before becoming the “everything store.” Facebook began as a social network for elite college students before taking on global communication. For Ramp, corporate credit cards offered entry into transforming spending.
Glyman and Atiyeh left Capital One on amicable terms to start Ramp in early 2019. They weren’t the first tech startup in the corporate-card market: Y Combinator–backed Brex was two years old by then. But Glyman felt that Brex was falling into the same trap as its big-bank progenitors by incentivizing new customers through rewards points. Ramp had a different idea: It would offer a flat cash-back rate of 1.5%. The thinking at Ramp was that it’s much more efficient to grow profits by reducing costs, rather than by increasing revenue in the hope of skimming some earnings off the top.
Credit cards were just the beginning: Glyman and Atiyeh had bigger ambitions to help companies save much more, by redesigning their financial back offices through automated processes and freeing up employees’ workdays. They had learned with Paribus that they could use early AI tools like natural language processing and computer vision to crawl through rich repositories like email inboxes and card data, understanding how individuals—or organizations—spent money. The card would be a wedge to own the “transaction layer,” helping businesses figure out broader ways to reduce their costs.
Ramp’s first investor breakthrough came by accident. To let off steam, Atiyeh spent long hours playing the battle royale game Fortnite. One of his online competitors was Delian Asparouhov, who worked with former PayPal executive Keith Rabois at Founders Fund. When Atiyeh let slip that he was working on a new venture (and would be stepping back from Fortnite), Asparouhov was intrigued. Rabois had been studying the corporate credit card space, even considering spinning up a new venture himself and serving as CEO. Less than two months after Ramp was incorporated, Asparouhov set up a meeting.
Glyman and Atiyeh didn’t even have a standard pitch deck, instead sending over a three-page email. But 20 seconds into their presentation in Founders Fund’s San Francisco office, Rabois recalls, he was smiling at Asparouhov. Ramp wasn’t doing points, and its founders understood the value of time, not just money. “It was 101% of my vision of what we should be building,” Rabois tells Fortune.
Founders Fund ended up leading five of Ramp’s funding rounds. In fact, nearly every one of Ramp’s venture rounds has been led by so-called insiders, investors who had previously put money into the company. “Venture is a power law business, and there’s a power law within the power law,” says Rabois. “If you find phenomenal founders, the best you can do is double and triple down.”
The future of cards
If credit cards were the wedge for Ramp, expense reports were the mousetrap—the product that convinced customers to stick around. Reports, the founders discovered in the early days of Ramp, were one of the biggest pain points for their buyers, typically CFOs or controllers. They couldn’t convince their employees to turn in their receipts on time. Competing with expense-report software like Concur and Expensify wasn’t in Ramp’s initial business plan, but the young team quickly realized that it was the natural next step. Rather than integrating their cards with another platform, why not build the software themselves?
The tool, launched in February 2020, has not changed much since its introduction: When an employee swipes their Ramp credit card, either the expense is automatically processed from transaction data that Ramp collects, or the employee gets a text asking for a receipt. Goodbye, expense reports.
This might not seem like a $22.5 billion idea, but the innovation was key to helping the startup expand its offerings beyond its credit cards. By organizing the transaction data coming in, Ramp could help a company realize where it was spending—and wasting—money.
Adding these functions meant competing with much bigger brands. To stand up to the likes of American Express, Ramp experimented with different marketing channels, sponsoring amateur golfers they thought might get airtime in tournaments, and blanketing popular tech podcasts with ads. They let a staff software engineer named Joowon develop a cult following on Twitter and adopted an almost-neon yellow as their color to stand out from the sea of finance green and blue.
This year, Ramp even doled out millions for a Super Bowl spot, a striking move for a company built on the altar of savings. The company had an ace up its sleeve: Saquon Barkley, the Eagles’ All-Pro running back. Normally, a starting Super Bowl player doesn’t have time to film an ad days before the biggest game of their life, but Barkley happened to be an investor in Ramp. (His manager reached out for an introduction after Barkley read Zero to One, the startup guide written by another Ramp investor, Peter Thiel.)
Ramp’s creative team—including Calvin Lee, the programming Olympian from Paribus—spent hours working through concepts. One early mockup had Barkley tackling an accountant midfield, imploring him to switch his company’s finances. Ramp nixed the idea: An injury to Barkley probably wouldn’t result in the best headlines.
The result was a blink-and-you-miss-it clip that aired during the Super Bowl’s first and third quarters, featuring Barkley sitting at a desk in his football gear and using Ramp’s expense-report tool. (Tag line: “Expenses should do themselves.”) It wasn’t riveting television, but it did underscore the most important undercurrent in the aggressive brand strategy: convincing the world that Ramp is more than a corporate-card company.
Credit cards themselves are not a high-margin business. Ramp still offers its cards for free, taking a tiny cut on interchange fees from transactions, which it has to split between its payment partners and its cash-back payments to customers. With Ramp only keeping around 0.8% of transaction volume, according to a person familiar with the company’s finances, even soaring revenue would not necessarily lead to sustainable profits.
CFO Will Petrie, an Instacart veteran, joined Ramp’s finance team in December 2022. Soon after starting, Petrie pushed to refocus Ramp on “contribution profit,” a metric that measured its income after accounting for direct costs, including the beloved cash back.
When Petrie began, almost all of Ramp’s contribution profit came from its cards. That began to change as Ramp evolved into a broader software platform. After its expense-report management tool, it began to offer additional à la carte products: The first was bill pay, which allowed companies to pay for invoices through ACH and wire transfers. Ramp later launched procurement, helping companies manage approval and payment for new vendors, as well as travel booking. It packaged them together into a subscription service called Ramp Plus in 2023, for which it charges a monthly rate per user plus a platform fee.
Petrie has been thrilled to see the business shift into non-card revenue (though he also stresses that Ramp’s core economics are “unbelievably healthy”). Now more than half of its 45,000-plus customers use more than one product beyond the card. The share of contribution profit coming from outside the card, which was under 5% when Petrie joined, has grown and is expected to top 30% by the end of the year. One result: As Ramp crossed the $1 billion annualized revenue mark in August, profit margins were getting healthier too. The company even recorded positive cash flow in the first quarter of 2025, though Petrie has since encouraged Ramp to spend more.
That doesn’t mean Ramp plans to abandon its bread-and-butter cards. Atiyeh compared the company’s approach to that of McDonald’s. The fast-food giant might make much more profit from soda and French fries than Big Macs, but it realizes that most people buy soda and French fries alongside Big Macs. “It’s not quite right to say the goal is just to sell more fries,” Atiyeh says.
The $22.5 billion sticker tag
Given the way Ramp’s investors gush about it, it’s no wonder Ramp managed to nearly double its valuation across two rounds in just two months. “You don’t have to squint to see a $100 billion company,” says Kareem Zaki, a partner at Thrive Capital. Rabois says he thinks Ramp can go public in the next year, though he acknowledges the company needs more board members. “We’ll see if Jensen is available,” he says, name-checking Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang.
The enthusiasm isn’t shared by everyone, especially after Ramp’s audacious $22.5 billion funding round. Ramp’s new revenue benchmark of $1 billion is larger than the $700 million that Brex reported in August, but its new valuation is nearly double Brex’s, despite both businesses operating at comparable scale. One former Ramp investor, who spoke with Fortune on the condition of anonymity, said that if Ramp went public, its valuation at IPO wouldn’t be half of the most recent round. Competitors (also anonymously) described the flashy valuation as a marketing strategy driven by its insider VC backers.
Marketing, of course, isn’t the only factor driving Ramp’s valuation; it’s also been buoyed by the company’s enthusiastic embrace of AI. Patrick O’Shaughnessy hosted Glyman on his popular Invest Like the Best podcast before Ramp became a sponsor. (O’Shaughnessy himself is not an investor through his own venture firm, which he jokes was a “huge mistake.”) He says Ramp’s reputation for shipping products at breakneck speed, along with its built-in customer base, means the startup has a natural head start on AI. “They’ve won the right to deliver with this technology,” he says.
Glyman points out that Ramp’s most recent (and oversubscribed) round included blue-chip new entrants, including Sutter Hill Ventures, T. Rowe Price, and Google Ventures. Founders Fund’s Trae Stephens, who has experience with astronomic valuations through his work at Palantir and Anduril, says that for certain types of startups, traditional metrics like the vaunted “rule of 40” go out the window. “People genuinely don’t know how to think about [these] software companies,” he says.
Ramp’s more pressing challenge will be sustaining its sky-high growth. With just 1.5% of the corporate credit card market, the company has nearly infinite green space. But that also means winning over more upmarket and enterprise clients, as well as growth outside the U.S.
Ramp grew at hyperspeed early on by carving out a niche among small and midsize businesses, including working directly with venture and private equity firms to cut costs at their portfolio companies. But larger companies can prove trickier. According to an executive from one competitor in the travel and expense space, enterprise customers prefer to buy the best-in-breed offerings from vendors in each category, rather than an all-in-one solution: “We are not seeing any Ramp pressure, particularly on the travel side, among larger customers.”
Glyman says that wooing bigger companies is an attainable goal, pointing to existing customers like the real estate giant CBRE and Shopify. Another potential area for growth is government. Many of Ramp’s core investors, including Rabois and Stephens, have close affiliations with the Trump administration and have championed efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut spending through closer partnerships with Silicon Valley.
Earlier this year, ProPublica reported that Ramp was pursuing a pilot contract with the General Services Administration for its employee credit card program, which processes tens of billions of dollars per year. The Democratic ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.), wrote a letter to the acting GSA administrator detailing “serious concerns” about Ramp’s ties to the Trump administration. Connolly died of cancer in May, and the probe appears to have tapered off. (“See the danger of criticizing Ramp,” jokes Rabois with characteristically sardonic bluntness. “Even God likes Ramp.”)
Glyman says that he has no political agenda, asserting that the “government stuff” wasn’t on his radar until he saw a post on X from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) about card usage among federal employees. He says Ramp is now involved in a proposal process with about 20 other companies, adding that none of its venture funds were involved in connecting Ramp with any governmental agency.
AI agents and the future
The biggest current focus for Ramp, as for seemingly every other company in the world, is AI. Ramp at least had a head start. Atiyeh and his team of engineers had been toying around with AI since back in the Paribus days; since then, increasingly sophisticated LLMs have allowed Ramp’s technical wizards to interact more with the nuances of companies’ receipts and expense policies.
As other financial services companies remain bogged down with AI pilots, Ramp rolled out its first customer-facing AI product a few months ago, which it calls “policy agents.” Now, rather than financial controllers having to sift through employees’ receipts to make sure they fit within the expense policy, they can upload the text of the policy itself: Ramp’s agents compare receipts against it, automatically approving any under a certain price threshold. Richard Gobea, finance manager at the online forum Quora, says that he went from having to check every relevant inbound receipt to only about 10% of them.
Ramp’s push into AI raises more questions about what it means for companies to save time. Does that mean eliminating jobs, no matter how menial they were? Atiyeh says technological improvements don’t necessarily mean jobs will be eliminated. “I’m a firm believer that a lot more jobs will be created, and hopefully more interesting jobs,” he says.
For its part, the 1,200-employee Ramp is staffing up like it’s preparing for war. Software developers walk around its Flatiron headquarters double-fisting energy drinks and protein shakes, and much of the company’s new funding is aimed at bulking up its engineering corps.
Ramp wants to push the bounds of automation: What if it could automatically read through an employee’s inbox and calendar, for example, and appropriately code the receipt for a work lunch, including all the participants, without even a prompt? What if it could automatically book an employee’s travel based on their schedule? What if it could sort through a company’s finances and recommend quarterly budgets for each department? These are all products Ramp plans to roll out in the coming months.
As the business adage goes, the question is whether incumbents can get innovation before startups get distribution. Ramp is somewhere in between: With its Super Bowl fame and $22.5 billion sticker price, it’s no longer the plucky startup nipping at American Express’s heels. It even counts former American Express CEO Ken Chenault—now managing director of VC firm General Catalyst—as an investor and advisor.
As Glyman likes to say, his main competitor has a 169-year head start. But Ramp has an advantage of its own. “What they’re doing with AI is a massive accelerant,” Chenault says.
“The valuation that they’re at now, they’re going to have to be a really big company for it to work,” Chenault adds. “But it can work, and it will work.”
This article originally appeared in the October/November 2025 issue of Fortune.