It started with sweaters.
While working at the Express clothing store in high school, Eric Glyman watched the prices of items in the store fluctuate randomly: 20% off one day, full price the next, 50% off the following week. Glyman couldn’t help but feel bad for the shoppers who had bought the sweater at full price, as they had essentially thrown money away.
Years later, Glyman noticed the same dynamic at play with airline tickets. Overnight, the price on a ticket he’d bought for a trip with friends had dropped by $100. After combing through fine print on the airline’s website, he sent an email requesting the fare difference. A few weeks later, a $100 travel credit showed up, seeding the idea for his first startup: Paribus. Created in 2014, Paribus automated the process of getting consumers refunds when prices dropped. Two years later, Capital One acquired the company and expanded it into Capital One Shopping.
These days, Glyman is applying the same ethos at Ramp, the company he co-founded in 2019 with the goal of helping businesses trim wasteful spending. Built around a new type of corporate charge card, Ramp’s software helps finance departments automate a wide range of workflows. By any standard, the company, which was recently valued at nearly $8 billion, has moved at a breakneck pace. It now processes 1 percent of all US corporate card transactions and helped customers save $1 billion and 10 million hours in 2024 alone.
Tracking such metrics is a central component of Glyman’s founding mission and Ramp’s operations. “We’re still the only business I know that reports on [customer time and money savings] regularly, seeks to measure it, and then holds ourselves accountable to it,” he says.
Credit card disruptor
Glyman grew up in Las Vegas and studied economics and East Asian studies at Harvard, where he spent a year abroad at Beijing’s Peking University. After graduation, he took a job as a financial analyst in New York. A few years later, on the trip that inspired Paribus, he met Harvard classmate Karim Atiyeh, who became a Paribus co-founder and joined him again at Ramp as co-founder and CTO.
When Capital One acquired Paribus, Glyman and Atiyeh landed in the credit card division. “I don’t think they knew what to do with us,” Glyman recalls. The role offered a revealing education in the economics of the industry. To Glyman, it seemed that credit card companies had a fundamental misalignment with their customers, who generally wanted to spend less money. Yet with fees generated from transactions, credit card companies had little incentive to help customers achieve this. “They’d pay lip service to saving money, but companies were almost trying to outsmart their customers with point systems,” Glyman says. “For a long time, the credit card business had very little disruption.”
To Glyman, Atiyeh, and Gene Lee, a Paribus engineer and Ramp’s third co-founder, corporate cards were an overlooked gateway into a company’s payments and finance system. When the trio left Capital One to start Ramp in 2019, the first target was expense reports. Across industries, many employees spent painful hours each month tracking down paper receipts, credit card statements, and emails, in order to manually enter spending details into an expense system. “It was crazy. You’d use your card, get a paper receipt, use some other tool to digitize the receipt, then re-enter the data, even though it was all digital to begin with,” Glyman says. He envisioned company cards tied to expense management systems, with AI tagging charges and filing them almost automatically onto expense reports. The card would also come with built-in spending controls that finance teams could use to tamp down on spending. It was, Glyman admits, a “weird idea at the time.”
Within two months of its founding, Ramp ran its first charge. Two months after that, Atiyeh and a small team of engineers developed software for setting controls on employee spending, followed by a system for managing and processing expense reports.
The art of saying no
Potential customers liked the idea of a new corporate card with easily changeable policy controls. But many also wanted Ramp’s card to link in with their existing expense management systems. Glyman didn’t want customers to only use the corporate card. He knew Ramp’s real value was the software, automation, and spending analytics that would exist around it. The card was just a gateway. “In the early days we had to say no [to potential customers] more than yes. We lost a lot of business because we decided to be stubborn,” he says. “We told people, ‘If you get this right, you won’t need two tools, the card and expense management will be one system’.”
To lure companies away from their established vendors, Ramp focused on delivering both increased functionality and enhanced design. “A lot of the existing software was clunky,” Glyman says. “We wanted to bring the idea of great design from the consumer space, to make it really easy for people to use.” Ramp now does instant receipt collection from employee emails and other apps and uses AI to auto-match them to the right expenses.
Continuous evolution
As Glyman talked to CFOs, a bigger picture emerged. “We’d see these finance teams using on average 20 to 30 different tools, and none of them had a full view of what they were spending,” he says. The large collections of software systems made it time-consuming for CFOs to close their books at the end of every month, while the lack of transparency into spending became a breeding ground for waste. “It seemed that the bigger companies got, the more waste crept in,” he says. “It was Kafka-esque.”
Ramp set its sights on addressing this inefficiency. Towards the end of the company’s first year, three engineers and one designer huddled together for three months to build bill payment software. Shortly after that, a team developed a system for corporate procurement, so that CFOs could process their spending on everything from office furniture to software subscriptions on Ramp’s platform. These features provided Ramp’s intelligence engine with more spending data to analyze, helping customers identify, for instance, when their software licenses were being underutilized or duplicate subscriptions for databases had been purchased. A few months later, Ramp acquired Buyer, a negotiation platform that analyzes data on big-ticket purchases such as annual software contracts, in order to save businesses money.
Ramp continues to expand. It recently jumped into cash management with Ramp Treasury, a new solution that allows customers to earn more on their operating cash and also pay their bills quickly and easily. “We compete with a lot of businesses that are addicted to their form factor, whether it’s a credit card company, a bill payment company, an expense management company, or a travel services company,” says Glyman. “Our goal isn’t any particular product. It’s to really understand and improve the workflow of customers.”
“Ramp is redefining what’s possible for finance teams. Their relentless focus on automation and efficiency doesn’t just save companies money—it transforms how they operate. We backed Eric, Karim and the team because they don’t just build great products; they rethink how a business should operate” notes Seth Rosenberg, general partner at Greylock and investor in Ramp.
Keeping a high talent vector at scale
From the start, Ramp’s pace has been dizzying. In under three years, the company hit $100 million in annualized revenue. It now has over 1,000 employees and 30,000 customers using its platform, from small businesses to large enterprises.
Glyman believes this has only been possible because of Ramp’s unique way of assessing talent. Ramp looks for a strong cultural alignment and for people whose abilities don’t always fit the mold. He refers to this as “finding the black sheep” and it’s a core philosophy for the company. “Extraordinary talent often hides in unexpected places,” Glyman says. “Finding them requires a willingness to look beyond resumes, see things differently, and identify someone’s strengths not their flaws.”
Ramp tries to match these hires to very clearly scoped roles. “We write unreasonably short job descriptions and make it easy to assess someone’s performance on the one metric that truly matters for the role.”
Culturally, Ramp looks for employees who are “kind.” It sounds hokey, but Glyman points to kindness as an essential character trait for productive, fast-moving teams. “Smart, determined people are the lifeblood of startups, but these individuals often think they’re always right, leading to disagreements. Kind people resolve these conflicts by uplifting, not outsmarting,” Glyman explains. “More interesting things happen when the goal is not to outsmart.” It’s a philosophy that’s gone a long way toward helping Ramp best rivals in the hypercompetitive fintech industry.
