Ramp has grown from a New York start-up into one of the world’s largest venture-backed fintech companies, serving more than 50,000 organizations. Founded in 2019, Ramp reached a $32 billion valuation in November 2025 by focusing on financial products that help companies save time and money. Today, that idea underpins an AI-powered platform spanning corporate cards, expense management, bill payments, procurement, treasury, and travel.
Ramp cofounder and CEO Eric Glyman sat down with Maurice Obeid, a senior partner at McKinsey, to discuss Ramp’s founding philosophy, its rapid growth, how AI is reshaping finance work, and why video games can be useful training for managing complex corporate systems.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Automating the worst hour of the month
Maurice Obeid: Great to have you, Eric. Tell me a bit about your company. What exactly does Ramp do?
Eric Glyman: Many people know us for bringing AI into finance teams. One way to think about it is that for many employees, the worst hour of their month is the one they spend doing expense reports. It feels low value and takes a lot of work.
Ramp automates that. We issue simple-to-use corporate cards that do your expenses: automatically capture receipts, label transactions, and map them directly into accounting systems. Beyond expenses, customers can pay bills, run procurement, and manage treasury through the platform.
Today, we serve over 50,000 organizations of all shapes and sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global leaders. The sum product is that we help companies spend less. On average, companies using Ramp cut their expenses by about 5 percent per year, which is very meaningful.
On average, companies using Ramp cut their expenses by about 5 percent per year, which is very meaningful.
Maurice Obeid: And there’s also a productivity gain as people spend less time on expenses?
Eric Glyman: That’s right. For all of us working, time is money. Instead of doing expenses, we could be selling the next client, working on the next great product, or doing strategic work. We automate that low-value work. While the financial savings are meaningful, it’s really about giving people their time back.
From small businesses to global enterprises
Maurice Obeid: Who are your core customers today, and how has that evolved since you started?
Eric Glyman: We launched about five years ago, and our earliest customers were small and midsize businesses—restaurants, farms, companies with 25 to 200 employees. In terms of customer count, many of our users are still in that segment.
But when you look at revenue and transaction volume, a large share now comes from companies with more than 1,000 employees, including global organizations with more than 100,000 employees. These companies have long accepted expense management as painful, and they’re increasingly realizing it doesn’t have to be.
Maurice Obeid: What are the main barriers to adoption, especially for large enterprises?
Eric Glyman: Some of it is psychological. For decades, people have assumed expenses are painful but inevitable. They’ve learned the tools, built processes around them, and assume that’s just how it works.
What many don’t realize is that expenses can be nearly zero touch. With Ramp, you tap a card, the transaction is checked against policy in real time, data is pulled directly from the merchant, categorized automatically, and synced to accounting. The average receipt on Ramp is submitted in about two minutes. Industry-wide, it’s closer to a month.
The average receipt on Ramp is submitted in about two minutes. Industry-wide, it’s closer to a month.
The second barrier is transformation risk. Being the person who says, “There’s a better way for 10,000 colleagues” can feel daunting. Our job is to show not just that it’s better, but that it’s safer and easier than the status quo.
Valuing employees’ time
Maurice Obeid: What do customers like about Ramp?
Eric Glyman: At an individual level, it’s the experience. Our net promoter score is in the 60s, comparable to some of the best consumer technology companies. Business software often ignores the fact that users are consumers in their personal lives and expect the same level of ease and design at work.
Customers are often surprised by how seamless Ramp’s software feels. Let’s say you make a purchase. Ramp can pull context from your calendar to know who you were meeting with, text you that person’s name, and you just tap “Yes” to confirm.
For finance teams, the impact can be profound. One finance leader told us that after switching to Ramp, an executive assistant who had spent years doing expense reports broke down in tears—not because she was upset, but because it was the first time she felt the firm truly valued her time. That kind of change matters.
And the savings matter, too. During the pandemic, several companies told us the savings Ramp delivered were the difference between layoffs and keeping people employed.
During the pandemic, several companies told us the savings Ramp delivered were the difference between layoffs and keeping people employed.
Maurice Obeid: That sounds like a B2B product delivering a consumer-grade experience.
Eric Glyman: Exactly. We’re building enterprise infrastructure with consumer-level usability.
Spending less, by design
Maurice Obeid: How did the idea for Ramp come about?
Eric Glyman: Ramp is my second company with my cofounder Karim Atiyeh. Our first was Paribus, an app that helped consumers automatically get refunds when prices dropped after a purchase. It was an early example of zero-touch savings.
We sold Paribus to Capital One, where it became part of Capital One Shopping, and we stayed on at the bank for a few years to integrate the business. While there, we learned a lot about credit cards.
As product thinkers, we interviewed customers, and it turned out they didn’t actually want more points, cash back, or rewards. They wanted more money in their bank accounts. Avoiding a $100 unnecessary subscription is far more valuable than getting 1 percent cash back on that purchase.
We asked a simple question: Why isn’t there a card or a set of software designed to help you spend less? It could be far better for the customer, and maybe the company could compete differently. That idea, aligning the company’s incentives with the customer’s financial well-being, became Ramp’s founding thesis.
We were certainly not early—maybe we were the 200th corporate card—and we were competing with established businesses that have been around forever. We thought, at the core, that a company designing its own incentives to align with the customers’ incentives might be able to carve out a name for itself.
We asked a simple question: Why isn’t there a card or a set of software designed to help you spend less?
Maurice Obeid: What did you get right that others didn’t?
Eric Glyman: Two things. First, alignment. We designed the company around enduring truths—similar to Jeff Bezos’s idea that customers will always want lower prices and faster delivery. In our case, customers will always want to save time and money. Everything we build is measured against that.
Second, speed. We move very fast. At Ramp, we track the number of days since the company was incorporated as a reminder that time is finite. Acting quickly in the customer’s interest is deeply embedded in our culture.
Maurice Obeid: Who actually makes the buying decision for Ramp?
Eric Glyman: Typically, CFOs, controllers, or business owners—the people designing the company’s financial infrastructure. But millions of employees use Ramp day-to-day, and about a third of our new customers come through word of mouth. Someone uses Ramp at one company, moves to another, and says, “I can’t go back to how expenses worked before.” That network effect is powerful.
A controversial bet on zero-touch expenses
Maurice Obeid: Were there points where you and your cofounders made decisions you weren’t sure would be right at the time, but that ultimately became inflection points for the company?
Eric Glyman: Yes. I’ll give you one example—and it was actually a very unpopular decision at the time. It cost us a lot of revenue.
This took place in 2020. The mission of the company was—and still is—to save companies their most valuable resources—time and money—so they can focus on, obsess over, and succeed at their purpose. That’s the core of it. Saving time and saving money is the heart of Ramp.
Originally, our ambition was to build a better card that helped companies spend less. But as we talked to customers, many of them said, “I like the idea of spending less money, but my real problem is that no one turns in expense reports on time.” One company even told us, “This is so painful that if you replaced our expense management software, we would switch to Ramp.” That would have meant roughly half a million dollars a month in spending coming to Ramp—which was a really big deal to us back then.
One of my cofounders, Gene Lee, said at the time, “I know that some of the biggest companies in America are banks, credit card companies, and financial institutions. And I know expense management companies are generally valued a lot less. But I think we should build expense management software. I think we should automate it.”
Many people—including me, at first—pushed back. I said, “I don’t think so. I think we should focus on cards.” But Gene kept pushing and said, “If we do this right, we can make expenses zero touch. Your expense policy can drive how the card behaves. We can pull data directly from merchants. Customers won’t need to buy two different sets of software. They can use just one.”
That led to a big internal debate. Should we integrate with existing expense management platforms, like everybody else did? Or should we build our own?
After a long fight, we decided to build our own. We became the first expense platform not to integrate with other platforms. And I have to tell you, we lost a lot of business. A lot of companies said, “We would love to switch to you, but we can’t unless you integrate.”
We became the first expense platform not to integrate with other platforms. And I have to tell you, we lost a lot of business.
We spent many months working to get it right. When we delivered the product to that customer I mentioned earlier, suddenly they had no late expenses. They were able to close their books accurately, with far less effort.
And while we grew much more slowly for a period than we would have if we’d made the easier choice, that decision ultimately gave us a product that was ten times better. It set off our first phase of really rapid growth.
Scale and growth
Maurice Obeid: Ramp is now one of the largest venture-backed fintechs. How has that scale affected growth?
Eric Glyman: People generally accept that the bigger you get, the slower you’re going to grow. What’s surprised us is that the bigger we’ve gotten, the faster we’ve grown. In 2025, our revenue growth rate was higher than in 2024, even with over $1 billion in annual revenue.
When there’s a better way to run your business, people wake up to it. We process more than 2 percent of all US corporate and small-business card transactions. We feel the motivation to reach the other 98 percent still doing things in this old and painful way.
What’s surprised us is that the bigger we’ve gotten, the faster we’ve grown.
Maurice Obeid: How do you think about competition and market opportunity?
Eric Glyman: Cards are just one part of it. We actually move more volume through bill payments—over $100 billion a year in checks, ACH [automated clearing house], and wires. Even there, our market share is less than 1 percent.
We’re early across categories: payments, treasury, procurement, travel. The opportunity is much larger than any single product.
Maurice Obeid: What are your top growth priorities?
Eric Glyman: Three things. First, serving more companies. Second, serving existing customers more deeply—most already use multiple Ramp products. Third, making every product more valuable each year.
When we launched, customers saved about 2 percent annually. Today, it’s over 5 percent. We think it can be much higher.
Maurice Obeid: Travel has become a fast-growing area for Ramp. What’s your vision there?
Eric Glyman: Our goal is zero-touch travel. No matter where you book, Ramp automatically understands that a flight, hotel, meals, and coffee are all part of the same trip. When you return, everything is categorized and ready—without lifting a finger.
We’re also making it easier to follow policy by design. Ramp Travel shows employees only options that are in policy, dynamically, in real time. Large language models allow us to translate written policies directly into working systems.
Using AI to free up people for higher-value work
Maurice Obeid: How are you using AI?
Eric Glyman: If your mission is to save companies time and money, you need to do work on their behalf. That’s what AI enables.
We think about finance work in three phases: setting rules, modeling what happened, and improving outcomes. These are fundamentally algorithmic problems. AI allows us to automate the low-value operational work so finance teams can focus on strategy.
Maurice Obeid: What keeps you up at night? Hopefully not a whole lot right now, given your success, but what could be a concern in five or ten years? Is it AI, or is there something else?
Eric Glyman: The whole world is changing in unbelievable ways. What is so strange about AI models is that they’ve read more about accounting than any accountant. They’ve read and written more code than any engineer. With these models, you can be the best doctor you’ve ever been if you know how to ask a good question. You can be the best software engineer you’ve ever been.
At Ramp, over a third of all code was written by AI, and the people involved aren’t necessarily engineers. People in customer support and design are using AI to write code, while engineers are creating some of our best-performing marketing collateral. Lines are blurring across all jobs. People were told in the past that they’re in a certain function and can’t do something else—that’s not true anymore. It’s uplifting and exciting in a lot of ways. At the same time, you need to think much more carefully about what you’re doing that’s uniquely valuable. It’s going to be a period of rapid change, and anyone who’s not periodically staying up at night thinking about this, maybe they should be.
Lines are blurring across all jobs. People were told in the past that they’re in a certain function and can’t do something else—that’s not true anymore.
Maurice Obeid: How has this affected how you think about talent?
Eric Glyman: Curiosity is the most important trait. We look for people who are eager to learn and experiment. We’re also looking for systems thinkers—people who can orchestrate work across humans and AI agents. In the future, onboarding 100 “digital teammates” may be easier than onboarding one human. Managing systems will be a core skill.
Leadership, systems thinking, and the CEO’s role
Maurice Obeid: Where do you get the training for managing systems? I imagine the average age is quite low at Ramp. If you want systems thinking, which is quite complex, do employees need training somewhere else, or is this an intrinsic capability you’re looking for?
Eric Glyman: I’m going to out myself as a big nerd. I think there’s a lot of amazing training in video games. When I was a kid, the games that fascinated me were StarCraft, World of Warcraft, and Age of Empires, real-time strategy games. The art of it is creating motion constantly. The premise is that you’re managing multiple moving parts at once: resources, timing, trade-offs, and an opponent who’s adapting in real time. You can’t just be building what’s in front of you. You have to think ahead: Once this is done, we need to kick off this process. Once this process is done, I’m going to evolve my strategy. A lot of what you’re trying to do is manage complex systems.
I’m going to out myself as a big nerd. I think there’s a lot of amazing training in video games.
Maurice Obeid: Chess is a good example of this. You’ve got to do all these difficult things to train, but it can be fun.
Eric Glyman: In chess, you’re thinking many moves deep, but one of the constraints is that players take turns, one at a time, and the pace is slow. In a video game, if I build faster and think ahead, I might be managing a lot more things simultaneously. Put differently, you might make one move in ten minutes, and I might position myself to make 30.
Maurice Obeid: Understood. You very kindly told me that it’s not chess. It’s actually more complex.
Eric Glyman: But chess is great. I’ll put it this way: chess, but everyone is allowed to make as many moves as fast as they can think.
Maurice Obeid: Makes sense.
Maurice Obeid: You’ve spoken about craft and leadership. How do you think about your role as CEO today?
Eric Glyman: My job is to create the conditions for people to do their life’s work. That means recruiting exceptional talent, removing friction so teams can move fast, and staying close enough to the work to understand how great outcomes are produced.
I spend roughly a third of my time on recruiting, a third on making it easier for teams to do great work, and the rest rolling up my sleeves—writing, selling, building alongside the team. Leaders should honor craft. It’s how you earn trust.
I spend roughly a third of my time on recruiting, a third on making it easier for teams to do great work, and the rest rolling up my sleeves…. Leaders should honor craft. It’s how you earn trust.
Maurice Obeid: Ramp was founded in New York. How has the city shaped the company?
Eric Glyman: New York has an incredible density of talent and ambition. It’s a financial capital, a creative capital, and a technology hub. When we started Ramp, it felt like the ingredients were finally in place for a great New York–born fintech company. We didn’t know it would be us, but we wanted to try.
Maurice Obeid: Who are your role models?
Eric Glyman: Steve Jobs, Satya Nadella, and Jiro Ono, subject of the great documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. It’s an amazing study of someone who cares deeply about his craft. Every night, he has an opportunity to make the best sushi he’s ever made in his entire life. It’s a beautiful way to think about your work.
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