Over the years, Ramp has built a name for itself in the corporate card and expense management space. It’s branched out into travel, bill pay, and more, while raising over $1.2 billion in venture funding.
Today, the six-year-old fintech startup is announcing a different kind of expansion — one that takes it into more of the digital bank territory — with a new product called Ramp Treasury.
In a nutshell, Ramp aims to give its customers a way to earn money and not just save cash, explains CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman, in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch.
“We looked at checking accounts and deposits that clients had linked to Ramp and realized that the vast majority were earning 0.00% interest,” he said. Ramp Treasury, Glyman added, is designed to work alongside a customer’s existing bank accounts, not replace them.
With Ramp’s new Treasury product, businesses can store cash in a business account and earn 2.5% or in a money market fund for potentially higher yields. They can have quicker access to their cash to pay bills, he said, considering cash stored in the business account is liquid.
As with other fintechs operating in the space, Ramp is not a bank but rather is partnering with banks on the offering, Glyman emphasizes. The startup is partnering with First Internet Bank of Indiana on the cash deposit account and Apex on the investment side.
Ramp operates in a crowded space that includes a host of competitors such as Mercury, Brex, Navan, Rho, and Mesh Payments. Brex, perhaps the most well-known of the bunch, at one time years ago had applied for a bank charter before later opting not to go that route.
For its part, Ramp is not aspiring to be a digital bank. But the step into offering a treasury account is a big one for the company that is expected to boost Ramp’s bottom line, Glyman said. It’s also helping it become more of a one-stop shop for its customers by allowing them to keep more of their cash in one place rather than move it around between different entities and accounts.
For now, the company is staying mum on its revenue figures. In March 2023, Glyman told TechCrunch that Ramp 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 in the summer of 2023 that it had passed $300 million in annualized revenue.
Today, Glyman shared only that Ramp now has more than 30,000 customers, up from about 15,000 this time last year, and that it powered over $50 billion in purchases across cards and bill payments. About 18 months ago, that figure was closer to $10 billion, according to Ramp.
The company primarily makes money from interchange fees charged for every swipe with a Ramp card as well as from transaction fees on bill payments. It also earns SaaS revenue from customers who upgrade to its Plus offering, through foreign exchange from international money movement, affiliate fees when flights or hotels are booked through its travel product, among other things.
With the addition of its Treasury product, Ramp will also earn a spread from its bank partners on aggregate balances across all funds held in a customer’s business account.
“We pass much of this back to the customer in the form of the earn rate we promote, but we do maintain some economics to ensure profitability,” Glyman said.
Ramp is one of the few large fintechs that has not had to lay off employees in recent years, although like most others, its valuation has taken a hit from previous highs. Last April, it raised $150 million in a round led by Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund at a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion. That financing did bring it back closer to the $8.1 billion valuation it had achieved in March of 2022.
The startup crossed the 1,000 employee mark by the end of 2024, Glyman said — up from 730 at the time of its raise last April.
Looking ahead, Glyman said Ramp is eyeing an IPO in the long term.
“We are just trying to build a great business, regardless if it’s private or public,” he said.
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