I'll be honest: I hadn't heard of Ramp until recently.
That is not a confession of ignorance — it is the point. There are companies that announce themselves loudly and companies that build quietly until the numbers make silence impossible. Ramp is the second kind. Founded in New York in March 2019, it spent its first years doing something that sounds almost boring: helping businesses spend less money. The corporate card that was designed, from day one, to reduce the spend on the card rather than maximise it.
In September 2026, Bloomberg reported that Ramp is in early talks to raise approximately $1 billion at a $60 billion valuation. Eighteen months ago, the company was valued at $13 billion. The ladder since March 2025: $13bn, $16bn, $22.5bn, $32bn, $44bn, and now $60bn on the table. Six marks in eighteen months.
A company that built slowly and then accelerated into something most people didn't see coming. It is a pattern worth understanding.
Where It Started: A Missed Flight Refund and a Revelation Inside a Bank
Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh met at Harvard. In 2014 they started Paribus, a price-tracking app born from Glyman's frustration after missing an airfare price drop — the software automatically caught retroactive discounts and filed refunds on customers' behalf. Capital One acquired Paribus in 2016, and Glyman and Atiyeh stayed on for roughly three years running the business inside the bank.
That period inside Capital One changed the trajectory of everything that followed. That experience showed Glyman something he found strange: card companies made money by convincing customers that points and rewards were valuable, then quietly devaluing them. The entire credit card industry was built on a model that encouraged spending — more spend meant more interchange fees, more revolving balances, more revenue for the issuer.
Glyman's question, when he and Atiyeh left Capital One in 2019 to found Ramp with Gene Lee, was deliberately perverse: what if a corporate card helped companies spend less instead of more? What if the product's success metric was savings, not spend volume?
Glyman and Atiyeh talked with approximately 100 finance experts before launching Ramp's corporate card, finding that potential clients were unhappy with the inefficiency of existing methods for collecting receipts and logging expenses. The company launched publicly in February 2020 — the beginning of a global pandemic that turned out to be, accidentally, perfect timing. Companies were cutting costs. The corporate card that helped you spend less was suddenly exactly what finance teams needed.
The Six Valuations in Eighteen Months
Ramp passed $1 billion in annualised revenue in June 2026. Purchase volume grew approximately 170% year on year in March, at roughly twenty times the scale it was when it last grew that fast. The company is free cash flow positive — which makes the $1 billion fundraise unusual.
A company that generates cash does not need to raise capital. What it can do is take capital when the window is open and the terms are favourable — essentially pre-empting the IPO process by building a cap table that already reads like a public register. GIC, Ontario Teachers', Goldman, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, D.E. Shaw. The institutional investors that would normally enter at the IPO are entering now, in the private market, at each successive mark.
The $60 billion valuation is approximately 40 times estimated annualised revenue. For comparison: Brex, same category, sold to Capital One in January for $5.15 billion. Ramp is valued at more than ten times what its nearest comparable sold for. That premium is not for what Ramp is today. It is for what investors believe Ramp is becoming.
For more on how private valuations and IPO dynamics interact, the FreeMalta IPO Watch tracks the companies moving from private to public — and the ones, like Ramp, that are rewriting how that transition works.
What Ramp Is Actually Building
Ramp started as a corporate card that killed expense reports. Then it added bill pay. Then procurement. Then treasury management. Then accounting automation. Each addition expanded the surface area of the product without abandoning the original premise: help companies spend less and manage money more intelligently.
The move that makes the $60 billion valuation legible is what came next.
Ramp now issues cards to AI agents. With Visa. And tracks token spend across AI providers.
The logic is this: AI agents are becoming operational — they book meetings, make purchases, manage subscriptions, execute workflows. Those agents spend money. That spend needs to go somewhere on the ledger. No existing ERP system has a field for token costs. No existing expense management platform was built to track machine purchases. Ramp built both, because it already had the card infrastructure and the spend intelligence.
The company calls tokens the fastest-growing cost in business. Its data on AI spend is cited in the Financial Times. It has positioned itself as the entity that holds the ledger for machine spend — and whoever holds that ledger holds a control point when agents do the buying at scale.
This is the transition that separates Ramp from every other corporate card company. The competitors built for human expense management. Ramp built for spend intelligence, and spend intelligence applies equally to human and machine spend. The product architecture that works for 70,000 businesses tracking employee expenses is the same architecture that works for those businesses tracking what their AI agents are spending.
The Brex Comparison and What It Says
Brex launched in 2017, two years before Ramp, with a similar premise: a better corporate card for startups. It raised aggressively, grew quickly, and became the market leader in its category by 2022. In January 2026, Capital One acquired Brex for $5.15 billion — the same Capital One that had acquired Paribus, Eric Glyman's first company, a decade earlier.
The Brex exit is instructive. $5.15 billion is a successful outcome by almost any measure. But it is also an outcome that represents what a category-defining corporate card business is worth when its primary value proposition is card infrastructure and expense management. Brex sold the card business. Capital One bought the distribution.
Ramp's $60 billion valuation implies that investors believe Ramp is worth more than twelve times the Brex exit. That gap is entirely explained by the AI infrastructure thesis. If Ramp successfully positions itself as the financial operating system for AI agent spend — the entity through which machine purchases flow, are tracked, and are managed — then the addressable market is not the corporate card market. It is the enterprise AI infrastructure market.
That market does not yet fully exist. Which is exactly why Ramp is raising now, while the window is open, and building the infrastructure before the market matures.
The Companies You Haven't Heard Of
The Ramp story is a useful reminder about the limits of what any of us actually track.
There are companies that exist in the public consciousness because they advertise, because their founders are prominent, because they have been covered extensively by the press. And there are companies that build in relative quiet, accumulate customers and revenue and product capability, and surface into visibility only when the numbers make them impossible to ignore.
Ramp was the second kind. 70,000 business customers, $1 billion in annualised revenue, free cash flow positive — all of it built without the kind of brand presence that would make it a household name outside the finance and technology industries.
The FreeMalta company stories archive covers the founding histories of companies like Ramp — the ones whose origin stories explain the trajectory. Glyman's frustration with a missed flight refund became Paribus. The experience inside Capital One revealed the structural dishonesty of points-based cards. Ramp was the answer to a question that took a decade to fully formulate.
The $60 billion is not about corporate cards. It never was.
FreeMalta covers company founding stories and IPO developments. This article does not constitute investment advice. Trading involves risk. Capital at risk.
