Ramp expands into procurement, lands Shopify as a customer
Ramp continues to ramp up its business.
The fintech startup announced today that it is entering the procurement space as it focuses more on “complex” enterprises and that it has landed a new customer in Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify.
Over time, Ramp has continued to add on to its offerings – having started out as a corporate card startup company and gradually over time adding features such as bill pay, vendor management and travel expense management, among others.
And while the startup started out focused on small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), it now works with “businesses of all sizes” — from startups to multibillion-dollar enterprises to potato farmers. Today, more than 15,000 businesses use Ramp, compared to 5,000 in March of 2022, the company said.
Specifically when it comes to Shopify, that company is now using Ramp as its sole expense management provider, noted CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman.
As Ramp has continued to move more up market, it has worked to expand its product suite. In response to the needs of Shopify and other large companies, for example, Glyman said Ramp created an additional tier to its flagship product offering, with new capabilities designed for “businesses with complex financial needs.” That new tier is called Ramp Plus.
It is also now offering a new and automated “procure-to-pay solution” within Ramp Plus with the goal of giving large enterprises “a viable alternative to incumbents like Amex, Concur and Coupa.”
The move into procurement was an organic one, Glyman said, based on the demand Ramp was seeing from “larger and more complex businesses that have been moving more and more of their finance operations on to the Ramp platform.”
He added that the company did not expect the expansion into procurement to have a significant, immediate impact on Ramp’s business in terms of revenue.
“The vast majority of our revenue comes through interchange – however, we’re offering procurement because our customers asked for it…[and] it encourages deeper use of Ramp’s core card and accounts payable platform.”
Ramp’s entrance into the procurement space is an interesting – and a bit of an unexpected – one. The need for innovation is certainly there and there are some investors putting money into the space. For example, Y Combinator recently led a $100 million Series C round into Zip, a startup developing procurement software.
We were curious if Ramp worried it might be trying to go into too many different directions. (It’s something that competitor Brex admitted to having done during an interview at Disrupt in October of 2022).
But in fact, it’s the opposite.
“In general, we believe financial services companies have been too unambitious — as the world went from no phones to flip phones to iPhones, your credit card basically never evolved. It’s a shame,” Glyman told TechCrunch. “If it comes across that Ramp is pursuing an ambitious vision, it’s because we are — we simply believe that financial products should be much, much better, and much more focused on improving outcomes for customers than they are today.”
Meanwhile, Glyman demurred when it comes to sharing hard revenue figures but he did share that Ramp’s annualized revenue is in the “several hundred million dollars” range, and continues to grow (by 4x in 2022). The company also claims that it has helped its customer save over $600 million and 8.5 million hours of time.
Landing Shopify as a customer is significant for Ramp, considering that Shopify is a public, multinational company that has about 11,600 employees and contractors worldwide. Ramp primarily makes money off of interchange fees, so each time a Shopify employee uses one of its corporate cards, that’s presumably more revenue dollars for Ramp.
Notably, making a push into the enterprise is also something Brex did in 2022 when it announced it was “very focused on signing up new net large enterprise customers” and had landed DoorDash as a customer.
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