Expense management startup Ramp has raised another $150 million at a $7.65 billion valuation after the funding round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today.
New investor Khosla Ventures and existing backer Founders Fund co-led the raise, which also included participation from new backers Sequoia Capital, Greylock and 8VC. Other existing investors Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Sands Capital, D1 Capital, Lux Capital, Iconiq Capital, Definition Capital, Contrary Capital also put money in the latest round.
The raise is being billed as an extension of Ramp’s Series D, in which the fintech firm raised $300 million at a 28% lower valuation of $5.8 billion. The latest infusion of capital brings it back closer to the $8.1 billion valuation it had achieved in March 2022.
With this raise, Ramp has secured $1.2 billion in equity financing and $700 million in committed debt financing since its inception in 2019.
In March 2023, co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman told TechCrunch that the company saw its revenue grow 4x in 2022 — led by its fastest-growing bill payment division — but was not yet profitable. The company had crossed paths $100 million in annual revenue before its third birthday in March 2022 and said last summer that it had surpassed $300 million in annual revenue.
While the company declined to disclose updated revenue figures, Glyman told TechCrunch today that in the first quarter of this year, Ramp’s overall purchase volume and revenue growth grew “faster than the same period in 2023, to a much larger base.”
Notably, Keith Rabois led the investment for new backer Khosla, having recently moved to the firm from Founders Fund. Apparently, there were no hard feelings on the part of Founders Fund, which still participated in the financing, even without Rabois.
The relationship with Founders Fund “runs so deep,” Glyman said, as the company has been its first institutional investor since its “very early days.” While working with the entire team there, Glyman singled out partners Napoleon Ta and Delian Asparouhov as the “most involved” since Rabois’ departure. (Rabois originally represented Founders Fund and has been on Ramp’s board since 2019.)
Glyman said he believes Ramp’s continued emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) also helped attract Khosla’s interest. (Khosla is an early investor in OpenAI.)
“He was so ahead of the curve in investing with OpenAI and what’s going on in the AI world that of course we were so excited,” he added.
Ramp counts over 25,000 companies in various industries as clients. Interestingly, venture-backed startups represent a “minority” of their customer base, which includes farms, stores, hospitals and nonprofits.
Glyman told TechCrunch that the new funding will be used to “triple down” innovation, including using AI capabilities “to automate cumbersome processes, provide deeper insights into spending, improve decision-making capabilities and more.” . Last November, Ramp announced a new integration with Microsoft Copilot as part of its efforts to integrate artificial intelligence into its offering.
“I think there’s this shift in AI investment from being primarily in these big infrastructure models to the application layer,” Glyman said.
Ramp will also use the money for acquisitions. In January, the company announced it had acquired AI startup Venue as it expanded its procurement offering. In general, over the last few years, Ramp has been on what might seem like a buying spree. In August 2021, Ramp bought Buyer, a “trading as a service” platform that claimed to save its customers money on big-ticket purchases like annual software contracts. Then, last year, Ramp acquired Cohere.io (not to be confused with OpenAI competitor Cohere). Cohere.io was a startup that built an AI-powered customer support tool.
Ramp currently has about 730 full-time employees, up from 495 a year ago.
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