Payments Startup Ramp Valued at $8.1 Billion in Latest Funding Round

(Bloomberg) — Ramp, a startup that offers corporate cards and other finance tools to businesses, raised $750 million in a funding round that valued the fintech at $8.1 billion. 

An equity raise led by Founders Fund generated $200 million from existing investors and new ones including General Catalyst and Avenir Growth Capital, Ramp said Monday in a statement. An additional $550 million in debt financing came from firms including Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Founded in 2019, Ramp has been building its finance platform for businesses, including a corporate card that tracks employees’ expenses and a bill-pay service that’s its fastest-growing product. The company bought procurement platform Buyer last year, and now handles more than $5 billion of payments volume on its platform annually, with revenue growing almost 10-fold last year. 

The business plans to use the new funding to build its team, keep up with growth and maintain some dry powder in case another deal comes up, according to Chief Executive Officer Eric Glyman.

“A lot of the funding is just keeping up with the fast pace of growth,” Glyman, who is also a co-founder, said in an interview. On the dealmaking front, “over the coming years, there may be opportunities, and we’ll want to have the balance sheet to lean in.” 

Ramp had roughly 20 employees two years ago and now is at around 275. The company is on pace to double that in the coming year, with the business seeking to add more employees in engineering, product design and data science, Glyman said. Ramp also plans to open a new office in Miami later this year. That was driven in part by Miami’s burgeoning tech scene with a “high talent density” and the fact that Ramp’s other co-founder, Karim Atiyeh, moved there recently, Glyman said.  

“Miami has just kept coming up for a couple reasons,” he said. “It’s experiencing a lot of growth and a lot of businesses are being created there.”

The CEO said the firm has no current plans to go public but will evaluate all options. 

“The product velocity and execution has been unparalleled in my 21 years of experience in tech,” said Keith Rabois, a partner at Founders Fund, said of Ramp’s growth. “Their ability to execute rapidly and perfectly — because in financial services you have to be very accurate, too — is really unprecedented.” 

The company’s customers include payments platform Marqeta Inc. and Truebill Inc., which helps users track bills and monitor and cancel paid subscriptions.

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