Ramp is taking aim at American Express by upending corporate credit cards. Can the $22.5 billion startup live up to the hype?

Calvin Lee had his pick of jobs. A former silver medalist in the International Olympiad in Informatics, Lee had racked up internships at prominent institutions from Jane Street to Google during his three years at MIT. By the spring of 2019, he was juggling offers from Citadel and other hedge funds that would have made him a multimillionaire before he was old enough to rent a car.

But then Lee got a call from Karim Atiyeh, his former boss at a tiny fintech startup called Paribus, where he had interned for a month as a freshman.

Paribus had been acquired by Capital One, and Atiyeh and his cofounder, Eric Glyman, had been working for the credit card giant long enough to realize there was significant dissatisfaction among corporate customers—and a huge opportunity. They were starting a new company, called Ramp, to build a better, more efficient generation of corporate cards.

Atiyeh asked Lee to join as a founding engineer. And then came the bold claim: He promised Lee that Ramp would become a unicorn—a billion-dollar-valuation company—within two years.

Lee took the gamble. Exactly two years later, in April 2021, Ramp announced a Series B funding round that valued the young startup at $1.6 billion. Lee jokes that it was lucky he hadn’t done his research; no New York–based tech company had ever grown its valuation that quickly. “Sometimes it’s best not to know the odds,” he wrote on Twitter at the time.

Atiyeh and Glyman had taken their own risky bet by leaving senior positions at a Fortune 500 company in their mid-twenties. But their business model, with its laser focus on saving money, proved to be a perfect fit for the corporate mood as the COVID pandemic sent companies scrambling for cost-cutting options. After gaining early support from venture capitalist Keith Rabois and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, their proposition took off, propelling Ramp to an astonishing $100 million run rate three years after it started.

Today, Atiyeh’s unicorn promise to Lee looks almost quaint. The six-year-old startup just broke $1 billion in annualized revenue in August, and it now claims more than 45,000 businesses as customers. Over the past few years, Ramp has steadily built its suite of automated financial services for corporate clients. And Ramp’s promise that AI can make those services more powerful has enabled it to reach escape velocity, with one of the most daring one-two punches in venture funding this side of OpenAI. In July, just one month after announcing a Series E led by Founders Fund that valued Ramp at $16 billion, Glyman revealed a fresh Series E-2, led by Iconiq—valuing the company at a whopping $22.5 billion.

Software companies aiming to reduce the drudgery of back-office tasks don’t usually become household names like Uber or ChatGPT, but Ramp, inexplicably, is well on its way. (The company cemented that status this February with the ultimate flex of startup self-confidence: a Super Bowl ad.) Having proved it can play with the big kids in cards and financial management, Ramp is now pursuing a more ambitious project: rewiring how companies spend. Ramp accounts for about 1.5% of the $2 trillion corporate and small-business credit card market in the U.S., but Glyman is setting his sights on leapfrogging American Express, the 175-year-old financial juggernaut that accounts for around a third of corporate credit card volume.

The fact that Ramp can realistically consider such goals, just six years into its existence, is a telling snapshot of how quickly startups can ascend in a business climate increasingly obsessed with efficiency. Rapid improvements in technology have enabled Glyman and Atiyeh to execute on their fintech idea with remarkable speed. Meanwhile, the corporate world’s ever-growing need to prove it can turn such tech into meaningful, money-saving changes is generating feverish demand from customers and investors alike. Through an embrace of AI-powered automation and coffers filled with billions in venture funding, Ramp is taking full advantage. “Banks are selling money,” Glyman tells Fortune. “At our core, we’re selling time.”

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