Ramp is gearing up for a new Miami office. Its latest funding round was led by Founders Fund and included debt financing from Goldman Sachs and Citi. The company is in the T&E management software space. It plans to open a new office in the next six months.
Founders Fund led round
Founders Fund has taken an interest in a number of startups and plans to plant a flag in Miami. Among these companies are EchoSign, Brex, and Zenefits. The company plans to invest in early-stage enterprise software companies and plans to take a generalist approach.
The Ramp deal is an example of this trend. The startup provides corporate cards and software for managing employee expenses. It has just raised a $1.6 billion funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The company is also backed by Spark Capital, D1 Capital Partners, and Redpoint Ventures. It also partners with Stripe and Thrive Capital.
Company is in T&E management software space
The T&E management software space is growing quickly thanks to the increasing demand for automated solutions. According to Grand View Research, the toonily market will be worth $17 billion by 2017. While big names such as IBM and Certify are dominating the space, startups have emerged to challenge them. Ramp, for example, has recently raised $750 million in debt and equity financing, and its post-money valuation is estimated at $8 billion.
Raises 550m
The new capital will be used to build a new office in Miami. The latest round was led by Founders Fund and includes debt financing from Citi and Goldman Sachs. The startup will also use the funds to expand its customer base and hire more people. Its mission is to help entrepreneurs make the world a better place through their innovative ideas.
Attracts Founders Fund
The Founders Fund has led an investment in Ramp, a corporate credit card management software company. The deal, which was announced in December, is an example of the firm’s appetite for high-growth companies. It also shows the growing interest among venture capitalists in early-stage companies. Ramp was founded only three years ago, but is already valued at nearly $8 billion, according to a recent report.
The investment is part of a larger round of funding, including the Founders Fund and Stripe. Other investors include Goldman Sachs, Coatue Management, D1 Capital Partners, Thrive Capital, and over a hundred angel investors.
Corporate spend management startup Ramp said today it has raised $750 million in venture funding, bringing its valuation to $8.1 billion.
The funding includes $200 million in fresh equity funding from a group of investors led by Founders Fund, and $550 million in debt financing. Existing investors Stripe and Thrive Capital also participated in the funding round.
This brings New York-based Ramp’s total capital raised to about $1.4 billion since its 2019 founding. Funding will be used to accelerate development of Ramp’s financial automation tools and integrate more features. “That’s kind of been the core of Ramp and what we continue to hear users and customers value most,” said Chief Business Officer Colin Kennedy in an interview.
Kennedy said the three-year-old startup, founded by Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh, is focused squarely on helping companies become more profitable through finance automation and giving finance professionals better visibility across areas of company spending. Saving companies money is the goal, Kennedy said.
With the new infusion of capital, Kennedy said the company plans to expand into new verticals, add more employees and launch additional features that further automate expense management processes. The debt financing, which includes $300 million from Citigroup and an additional $150 million from Goldman Sachs, will support Ramp as it scales. Kennedy said Ramp is fortunate that new funding was driven by current investors, who want to see revenue and customer base growth. For Ramp, “those metrics have remained extremely strong,” Kennedy said.
Ramp now has about 5,000 business clients, up seven times over last year. The company declined to provide last year’s revenue figure. Ramp expects about $5 billion of annualized payments volume on its platform.
Kennedy said Ramp, which makes money through card interchange fees, still serves just a fraction of the overall market.
Competitors in the space include larger incumbents American Express, Chase and Capital One, as well as Expensify and Concur on the expense management side. Another competitor, fellow fintech Brex, has also raised more than $1 billion, per tech.
As Ramp continues to expand its financial automation capabilities, “we don’t hear from customers or see, as we talk to prospects, that there are other companies directly addressing this problem in this space where we’re playing,” Kennedy said.
Given that Ramp launched with a focus on the corporate card, its second act “has massive potential,” Founders Fund partner Keith Rabois said in the release. He’s held executive roles at PayPal and Square in the past.
In February, Ramp introduced a travel offering to let clients enforce their employee travel and expense policies, automatically collecting travelers’ receipts for processing on the backend.
With the capital infusion, Kennedy said the company also aims to land more partnerships. Those with Amazon Business, Gmail and Lyft that involve automatic receipt collection have “resonated strongly with our base, and there’s a lot more we know we’d like to do there,” Kennedy said.
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