if you don’t know much about ramp beyond their subway ads, don’t fret. ramp is a startup that provides corporate cards and expense management platform with the unique goal of helping businesses save money— they have grown to well over nine figures in revenue, over 10,000 customers, and $1.4 billion in venture funding from the founders fund, d1 capital partners, stripe, conversion capital, to name a few. ramp is currently being valued at over 7.6 billion.
in april 2024 ramp raised an additional $150 million in a funding round led by khosla ventures and founders fund. new investors including sequoia capital and greylock also participated in ramp's latest funding round.
but why has ramp, in particular, been so successful?
a strong product —> “at ramp, our culture is velocity. It shapes every process and team ritual. It’s how we develop our people. It’s our solution to nearly every problem. And most importantly, velocity is key to our business strategy. It’s how we deliver on our mission to save customers their most valuable resources—their team’s time and money.” the vp of product at ramp is keen on moving efficiently and fast. part of their competitive advantage is ramp responds very quickly to change - and can react proactively.
a market ready for disrupting —> the corporate credit card market is roughly 1 trillion. within this market exist beasts like amex, rho, and brex. ramp has been able to penetrate a dry and dinosaur-approach market with room to grow.
incredibly scalable —> ramp just launched their latest product, ramp travel. ramp is scalable in terms of platform extensibility, but also in their products. “i think there’s this shift in ai investment from primarily being on these large infrastructure models to the application layer,” glyman said
well-positioned branding —> ramp’s marketing resonates well with the consumer. it’s a bit punchy but not too punchy. it hints at what they do as a company with buzzwords without spelling out what they do.
in summary, ramp is an exemplar of punchy marketing meets great product.
going forwards, i will be highlighting startups that are notable to me — specifically in consumer marketing and product. let me know if you liked this short edition!
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sources, in case you wanted to read some more on ramp:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fintech-upstart-doing-300-million-year-revenue-top-startup-8wj5c/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenli1/2022/11/14/they-built-ramp-into-an-8-billion-company-in-under-4-years-the-inside-story-of-how-they-did-it/
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/17/ramp-raises-another-150-million-co-led-by-khosla-founders-fund-at-a-7-65b-valuation/
for images: https://ramp.com
- has a great piece on ramp: