Holy crap!
@tryramp just raised $750M at a $44B valuation. 🤯
That's about 8.5x what Capital One paid to buy Brex two months ago.
Ramp says the new capital raise, led by ICONIC and GIC, to build the cost infrastructure for AI. The big picture the investors are buying is that there's a structural change to the economy coming.
We used to talk about
1. Capital - funding for businesses
2. Labor - people
The third, new one is intelligence. Intelligence comes with a token supply chain and that is paid for next to the existing vendors a business manages.
And there is a cost problem. Uber burned through their entire annual AI token budget in four months.
The Ramp product is rapidly shifting to address this with features such as token spend management, procurement agents, accounting agents, and a deeper Visa tie-up that lets AI agents make corporate payments on their own.
And on pure fundementals Ramp is crushing.
Purchase volume grew ~170% year on year in March, the fastest in three years, at roughly 20x the size they were 3 years ago. Woof.
And the contrast with Brex is noteworthy. Brex created this category. The original "Amex for startups." Capital One bought the whole company in April for $5.15B, a steep markdown from Brex's $12.3B peak.
Ramp, founded a full two years after Brex, just got priced at roughly 3.5x Brex's best-ever number. S
The difference is boring and brutal: Ramp went cash-flow positive and kept compounding. It was worth $13B in March last year and $44B now.