Fintech has exploded in the last five years. Startups in the category raised more than $350 million in VC funding from 2019 to 2023, according to data from CB Insights. Despite all this growth, Eric Gylman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp believes the industry and companies like his are just scratching the surface.
Glyman recently said about the TechCrunch Found Podcast that despite how much his unicorn corporate card and expense startup has grown so far, it has only tapped into 1% of its potential market share.
“As fast as we’ve grown, in our biggest card market, we still have 99% plus of the market to go,” Glyman said. “So some of it is really just, we want to bring the magic to more companies [so that] Expenses can be effortless accounting, you know, can be radically simpler.”
Despite the rapid growth of the fintech category over the past few years, Glyman started building his first fintech startup before the publicity cycle. Glyman and his current co-founder Karim Atiyeh launched their first fintech startup, Paribus, in 2014. The startup used artificial intelligence to create emails for its users to send to stores to get a price change if a product they recently purchased was on sale. The company raised just $2 million before being acquired by Capital One.
Times have changed for fintechs, and Glyman talked about what it’s been like to build and raise capital for a fintech startup as the market has changed over the past decade.
Glyman also talked about the changes in AI technology. When the team was building Paribus, the genetic AI technology for generating emails was still relatively rudimentary, and the rest of the company’s AI technology was based on very simple language models. For Ramp, the AI tech stack looks very different.
“It’s really deep, I’d say, I think a decade ago, you’d use it in hyper-targeted use cases to today, I don’t think there’s a part of Ramp that’s not affected in some way, by AI, and I think it will continue to accelerate,” Glyman said.
Glyman also talked about how Ramp thinks about scaling and how the company approaches expanding into new categories. Glyman said the company is looking to plug the cracks and gaps that still exist for its customers in their expense workflow as well as the new ones that continue to emerge. The company still has a long way to go.
“If we do it right, we believe and hope that the work will be purposeful, never boring, monotonous, but strategic, insightful and actionable to focus on high leverage and creative things,” Glyman said. “So that’s what we’re trying to work on. And it is, it was a lot of fun to get there.”
Ramp was founded in 2019 and is based in New York. The startup has raised more than $1.7 billion from venture capitalists and was last valued at $5.8 billion in August 2023.
