AI Finance App Ramp Is Valued at $22.5 Billion in Funding Round

Startup raises $500 million to further develop AI-based agents, CEO says.

Ramp, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to automate corporate finance tasks, on Wednesday said it had raised $500 million in its latest funding round.

Eric Glyman, co-founder and chief executive of Ramp, said thousands of customers have tried the company’s first AI agent.

The Series E-2 round, led by Iconiq Growth with participation from existing investors including Founders Fund and D1 Capital Partners, values the startup at $22.5 billion, it said.

The infusion of new capital will go toward hiring engineers, product experts and marketing and sales staff who will focus on building and selling Ramp’s AI agents, according to co-founder and Chief Executive Eric Glyman. The startup is best known for its corporate credit card and its expense management system.

Ramp’s fundraise coincides with the fast-paced growth of AI agents, the autonomous bots that can perform tasks on behalf of humans.

The New York City-based startup’s AI agent focuses on helping corporate finance teams automate tedious aspects of their work, such as compliance for employees’ expense reports. Future versions will help procurement teams manage their daily tasks and streamline bookkeeping, Glyman said.

“Functionally, we’re teaching software to think like people,” he said. The future of corporate finance, Glyman added, will be much more automated.

Since launching its first AI agent earlier in July, Ramp said thousands of customers have signed on to try it.

Richard Gobea, a finance manager at Quora, said the question-and-answer website is using Ramp’s AI agent to automate the work of an entry-level accountant or clerk who typically checks employee expenses against a corporate policy document.

“I’m spending my time digging in a little more on the expenses the AI agent is flagging,” Gobea said.

Founded in 2019, Ramp said it has over 40,000 businesses using its products, including several in the Fortune 100, and about 1,200 employees. It had over 15,000 customers in 2023. Ramp said it began generating cash flow earlier this year, with $700 million in annualized revenue in March. It declined to say what its current revenue is.

The company’s platform is built on AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others, which Glyman said are capable of “reasoning” through corporate policy documents, for example, to automatically suggest changes based on employee activity.

Ramp predicts and completes employees’ expenses using transaction data, historical patterns, and context from tools like Gmail and Google Calendar, it said. If more information for an expense is needed, employees get a verification message through SMS. Ramp then checks corporate policy, routes the expense for review if needed, and automatically codes it.

Ramp’s budgeting agent, which the company is planning to release, will be capable of proactively flagging a company’s financial planning and analysis team to approve a bill—before it reaches the chief financial officer, according to Gobea, Quora’s finance manager.

Still, not all finance teams are ready to jump on the AI-agent bandwagon, and Ramp faces off against competitors from payments startup Brex, which also offers a corporate card solution and expense platform, to giants like SAP and American Express. Its rivals are also integrating AI agents into their products.

The practical value of AI agents, while widely touted by software vendors, is still up in the air for businesses. For business leaders, that skepticism spans across corporate functions—from software development to information technology, sales, marketing, human resources and finance.

Part of Ramp’s challenge will be convincing CFOs and chief information officers that its AI agents are worth investing in—and are reliable—especially given the abundance of other business automation and AI options to choose from.

Some fintechs are still in recovery mode following a period of high interest rates, in which investment in private fintech firms fell 46% globally in late 2023. While Ramp did raise $300 million that year, it was at a valuation of $5.8 billion—short of the $8.1 billion valuation at a fundraising round in early 2022.

Ramp raised $200 million about a month ago in a Series E round at a valuation of $16 billion. The latest round brings Ramp’s total capital raised to $1.9 billion.

Write to Belle Lin at belle.lin@wsj.com