Spend management startup Ramp has raised another $150 million at a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion, 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 into the latest round.
The raise is characterized as an extension of Ramp’s Series D, in which the fintech company raised $300 million at a 28% lower valuation of $5.8 billion. The latest capital infusion brings it back closer to the $8.1 billion valuation it had achieved in March of 2022.
With this raise, Ramp has secured $1.2 billion in equity financing and $700 million in committed debt funding since its 2019 inception.
In March 2023, co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman told TechCrunch that the company saw its revenue grow by 4x in 2022 — led by its fastest-growing segment of bill pay — but was not yet profitable. The company had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue before its third birthday in March 2022 and said last summer that it had passed $300 million in annualized revenue.
While Ramp declined to reveal updated revenue figures, Glyman told TechCrunch today that in the first quarter of this year, the startup’s total purchase volume and revenue growth increased “faster quarter over quarter than it did over the same period in 2023, on 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 was its first institutional investor since its “very early days.” While they work with the whole team there, Glyman pointed to partners Napoleon Ta and Delian Asparouhov as being the “most involved” since Rabois’ departure. (Rabois originally represented Founders Fund and has sat on Ramp’s board since 2019.)
Glyman said he believes that Ramp’s continued emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) also helped attract Khosla’s interest. (Khosla is an early investor in OpenAI.)
“They were so ahead of the curve in investing with OpenAI and in what’s happening in the AI world that of course, so we were thrilled,” he added.
Ramp counts over 25,000 companies across a variety of industries as customers. Interestingly, venture-backed startups represent a “minority” of its customer base, which includes farms, shops, hospitals and nonprofits.
Glyman told TechCrunch that the new funding will be used to “triple down” on innovation, including using AI capabilities “to automate cumbersome processes, provide deeper insights into spending, enhance decision-making capabilities, and more.” Last November, Ramp announced a new integration with Microsoft Copilot as part of its efforts to incorporate AI into its offering.
“I think there’s this shift in AI investment from primarily being on these large infrastructure models to the application layer,” Glyman said.
Ramp will also put the money toward acquisitions. In January, the company announced it had acquired AI-powered startup Venue as it expanded its procurement offering. Generally, in the past few years, Ramp has been on what might look like a buying spree. In August 2021, Ramp purchased Buyer, a “negotiation-as-a-service” platform that claimed to save its clients money on big-ticket purchases such as 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.
Presently, Ramp has about 730 full-time employees, up from 495 a year ago.
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