Sixty billion, four months after forty-four

Ramp, the corporate card and spend-management company, said on Thursday that it had raised $1.85bn in a funding round that values it at $60bn, TechCrunch reported. The round was co-led by Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Sands Capital and Avenir Growth, according to the report, and brings the total Ramp has raised to about $5bn. A post on Ramp's blog, signed by its co-founders and co-chief executives Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh, is headed "Ramp at $60B".

The terms had leaked a week earlier. Bloomberg reported on 9 October, citing people familiar with the matter, that Ramp had raised about $1.85bn at roughly $60bn, a figure it described as the valuation before the new money, with Dragoneer and Thrive leading; Ramp declined to comment at the time, The Next Web reported. The valuation compares with $44bn in June, when Ramp raised $750m. By our arithmetic that is a rise of about 36 per cent in four months.

TechCrunch listed a long roster of other investors, including Capital International, Fidelity Management & Research, T. Rowe Price, D1 Capital Partners, Greenoaks, ICONIQ, GIC, Coatue, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The operating figures are the company's own. Ramp said annualised revenue has passed $2bn, up from a reported $1.5bn in June, and that revenue growth is 25 per cent faster than at this time last year. It put annualised purchase volume above $275bn, up 175 per cent on a year earlier, and customers at 85,000, up from 70,000 in June. By our arithmetic, revenue has risen by about a third and the customer count by about a fifth since the last round. The blog post says Ramp passed $2bn in annualised revenue over the summer "with positive cash flow".

The post also says customers save more than $1bn a month and that Ramp saved them 1.5 million hours in September. Those are Ramp's claims about its customers' outcomes and have not been independently verified. "Our mission hasn't changed. It's just gotten bigger," the co-founders wrote.

Much of the pitch is about artificial intelligence. TechCrunch said Ramp has embedded AI agents across its products, launched a corporate card designed for AI agents to use, entered the model routing business in August and, this month, launched Glass, a workspace that stores and shares the AI automations, prompts and skills that employees build. Named customers include Visa, Uber, Shopify, Robinhood, Anduril, Notion, Cursor and Figma.

"We believe Ramp is well on its way to becoming one of the defining companies of this era," Christian Jensen, a partner at Dragoneer, said in a statement. Keith Rabois, an early investor through Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, told TechCrunch last month that "Ramp is not worried about Rippling", the HR and payroll company that has moved into corporate cards, expense management and bill payments. In the same conversation he said Ramp would compete with Anthropic and that he wanted it to be "larger and more successful and more important than Anthropic". That is an investor's aspiration, not a company plan.

By our arithmetic, $60bn is at most 30 times the $2bn revenue run rate, a ceiling because the company says revenue is above $2bn. Neither the company's post nor the reporting breaks that revenue down, so the multiple is a guide to how investors price growth, not a measure of profit.

What the round tests is whether a payments-and-software business is valued as fintech or as an AI platform. The AI products described are recent, and none of the sources gives revenue from them. Komposite reported on Wednesday that Modal raised at about fifteen times its run rate, and has covered how payment authorisation is being rebuilt for software agents.