Peter Thiel-backed fintech Ramp nearly doubles valuation to $13bn

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Ramp, the corporate payments start-up backed by Peter Thiel and Thrive Capital, has almost doubled its valuation to $13bn, as financial technology companies rebound from a painful period of lower spending and economic uncertainty.

The five-year-old company hit the new valuation as part of a share sale in which investors including Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC, US private equity group Stripes and venture capitalists including Josh Kushner’s Thrive, Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst bought $150mn worth of employee stock.

New York-based Ramp, which manages expenses, corporate cards and accounting automation for businesses, was last valued at $7.65bn in April last year. The company already has the backing of some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investors, including Sequoia Capital and Thiel’s Founders Fund.

The leap in valuation to $13bn puts Ramp among the most highly valued US start-ups outside of a handful of artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI.

It follows rapid growth powered by an uptick in spending on card transactions and bill payments. But Eric Glyman, Ramp’s co-founder and chief executive, emphasised that it had benefited from using AI across the company.

“It is not possible to use Ramp without using AI,” he said, adding that the technology had quickly moved from simple chatbots into being “deeply integrated in every part of the business: expenses that do themselves, books that do themselves, money that finds higher yield”.

“We’re living in a world where computers can talk and think and reason [and] finance is really about reasoning: making sure your capital has more value each month,” he said.

Ramp’s valuation hit $8.1bn in 2022 but dropped to $5.8bn a year later as higher interest rates hit consumer spending — factors that also hit rival fintech companies such as Stripe and Klarna.

“Fintech obviously went through volatility given the wild swing in rates and spending across businesses and consumers,” said Kareem Zaki, a partner at Thrive Capital, who led the firm’s investment into Ramp.

“Businesses that took share before the downturn continued to take share, but customer spending was down. Now the market has turned around, they are accelerating,” he added.

According to a person with knowledge of the company’s finances, Ramp’s annualised revenue — a metric often used by fast-growing start-ups which multiplies the current month’s revenue by 12 — is $700mn. That figure is up from $300mn in August 2023.

The company is processing $55bn in payments on an annualised basis, compared with $10bn at the beginning of 2023. Ramp’s aim is to become a platform offering corporate customers a range of services, rather than a single product, according to Glyman.

The company aims to become a platform for corporate customers, and has diversified beyond payments into procurement and travel booking.

Zaki said this was reminiscent of another Thrive portfolio company, Stripe, Silicon Valley’s most prominent fintech company, which last week announced its valuation had grown to $90bn as part of its own employee stock sale.

The biggest US start-ups are increasingly looking to use regular secondary stock sales to enable staff cash out, as the businesses remain private for longer.

Ramp’s stock sale was arranged so that early employees could release some of their equity in the business in order to “send a kid through school or make a down payment on a house”, said Glyman. He added that the company had no immediate plans to launch a public offering.