Ramp: Automating the Entire P2P Process

On a mission to help finance teams build healthier operations through reimagining technology for back office finance, Ramp provides businesses of all sizes and stages with essential tools to modernise finance operations and help them thrive.

Founded in 2019, Ramp powers the fastest-growing corporate card and bill payments platforms in the US, enabling tens of billions of dollars in purchases each year. With enterprise customers including Marqeta, Mindbody & Classpass and Barry’s, Ramp is building a new way forward for finance – and is only just getting started.

Launched in 2019 as an improved corporate card designed to help companies spend less, Ramp's core mission remains unchanged: saving time and money for its customers to help them build more successful, profitable businesses.

What has changed, however, is its capabilities, which have expanded dramatically.

Controlling spend from the off

Ramp's software empowers procurement teams, automating the entire procure-to-pay (P2P) processes, eliminating approval bottlenecks and preventing out-of-policy spending before it happens. The platform offers increased efficiency and visibility across the procurement process.

With Ramp’s procurement software, businesses can effortlessly automate the different stages of P2P and have a consolidated procurement, bill pay and vendor management solution. This allows them to achieve real-time visibility and control over their team’s spend for faster decision-making, optimise value by reducing spend through price intelligence or other savings insights, track expenses, enforce compliance by implementing policies into the team’s tailored procurement set up and even automate some accounting. 

From a platform that centralises intake to capture any type of spend request, collect the right details upfront and gain earlier visibility into spend, Ramp builds custom intake forms with as many questions as needed.

It harnesses dynamic forms that adapt to answers from previous questions and issues purchase orders or virtual cards from approved requests.

Ramp is all about streamlining the procurement process by centralising discussions, tagging people directly in purchase orders and notifying them for quick responses in the orders. All approvers get access to the same information, preventing a time-consuming back and forth. 

Ramp is also building automated approval workflows within its procurement software to tailor to preferred business processes and integrate with the tools that teams are already using.

It allows route requests to approvers based on conditions specific to a business, a bidirectional sync with Ironclad for seamless contract review approval steps and gives stakeholders the ability to approve directly in Slack or Teams.

Ramp automatically generates purchase orders to get a clear line of sight into upcoming invoices and provides a consolidated view of every request and purchase order. It also codes purchase order line items, which sync to NetSuite or QuickBooks and match invoices to purchase orders for added control.

Procurement everyone can get behind

Ramp provides a workflow that ensures everyone gets the exact information required to make processes go as smoothly as possible. Employees are given a guided experience through every step of the business’ procurement process, allowing them to buy within the guardrails of a policy.

This gives finance teams early visibility into spending to better control costs, while procurement teams see increased adoption of its policy as well as more opportunities to negotiate ideal vendor terms.

Legal teams gain oversight into every contract to reduce risk, as Ramp’s intake form collects all information upfront, providing all the context needed for faster contract review and integrating with Ironclad, the contract management software.

Forrester Consulting conducted an independent study to measure Ramp's potential impact on customers and their businesses. Its results showed a substantial ROI, saving US$90,000 and more than 6,500 hours of work for employees after three years with Ramp.

As part of the commissioned study, Forrester spoke to companies with up to 1,500 employees to create a 250-person composite organisation. Ramp helped customers significantly reduce wasteful spending by consolidating their finance tools and improving their employees’ efficiency.

The continued expansion of Ramp

Early in 2024, Ramp completed a US$150m Series D-2 funding round, raising the company’s valuation to US$7.65bn. This round was co-led by Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, with additional investors including Sequoia Capital, Greylock and 8VC.

Existing investors Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Sands Capital, D1 Capital Partners, Lux Capital, ICONIQ Growth, Definition Capital, Contrary Capital and more are doubling down.

This new wave of funding will allow Ramp to “triple down", according to Co-Founder and CEO, Eric Glyman, who wrote on the company’s website.

“This new funding will allow us to triple down on the next wave of innovation to deliver much more value for our customers,” he wrote. 

“This includes using AI capabilities to automate cumbersome processes, provide deeper insights into spending, enhance decision-making capabilities and more. We’re just getting started as we help our customers create the finance function of the future.”

In Q1 2024, Ramp’s growth accelerated, with total purchase volume and revenue increasing faster quarter over quarter than it did over the same period in 2023, on a much larger base.

Last year, Ramp launched more than 150 new product innovations across a variety of surfaces, including advancements to its procurement offering, such as intake purchase requests, orchestrated approval chains, price intelligence to save on negotiations and accelerated purchase review cycles.

Eric added in his blog post: “As technology advances, our opportunity to accelerate our impact for customers is growing quickly. Our platform is set up to make AI a force multiplier of productivity for our customers and our plan is to continue embedding state-of-the-art AI capabilities to make financial operations vastly more efficient. This is the future.

“Innovative, dynamic and demanding companies across categories understand the significance of this. Leading businesses from e-commerce to defence, from space to mining, from healthcare to restaurants, from AI to farms and anything you can think of in between—all use Ramp to modernise and accelerate their finance functions.

“We are deeply indebted to our partners and investors for believing in the vision that we can change finance for the better. This new chapter isn't just about growing Ramp, it's about setting a new standard in financial operations, with our customers at the centre of everything we do."

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