Meet Ramp, a new startup that offers corporate credit cards with 1.5% cash back on everything. The company thinks that a cash-back program combined with an analysis of your payments to help you spend less is more valuable than alternative corporate card offerings.
Ramp is launching publicly today and has raised $25 million in funding from Keith Rabois, Coatue, BoxGroup, Conversion Capital, Soma Capital, Backend Capital and more than 50 business angels.
The startup doesn’t charge fees. All your employees can have a white Visa card for $0 per month. There are no foreign transaction fees and no interest either. The company plans on making money with interchange fees — like all card issuers, Ramp will get a very very tiny cut on all transactions.
One of the main selling points of Ramp is that it offers you control and visibility. You can set different limits for each employee, create as many cards as you want and set up spending rules. The service also helps you centralize receipts and attach them to each expense. There are some integrations with accounting software.
Like Brex, Ramp is going to work particularly well with high-growth startups. When you sign up, Ramp doesn’t require personal guarantees. You also get higher spending limits than what you’d get from traditional corporate cards — Ramp says you can expect limits that are 10 to 20 times higher than typical limits.
Unlike Brex, Ramp doesn’t have a complicated point-based reward system. You’re not going to earn more points when you order a Lyft or book flights through Brex. Instead, with Ramp, you get 1.5% back on all your purchases — it can be a recurring subscription, an expensive flight, a team lunch… 1.5% on everything.
Existing customers include some well-known startup names, such as Ro, Candid, Better, Eight Sleep and Truebill.
Ramp goes one step further by analyzing how you spend money. For instance, if you’re paying multiple subscriptions to the same service, Ramp is going to flag that as a duplicate subscription. If you’re spending an unusual amount of money on a specific service, Ramp will recommend a lower subscription tier.
The startup also offers free credits for dozens of third-party services, such as Amazon Web Services, Amplitude, Plaid, Datadog, DocSend, Notion, Twilio, Sendgrid, etc. Overall, it represents $175,000 in free credits.
Ramp was founded by Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh. The team previously founded Paribus, a startup that helps you save money on online purchases that was acquired by CapitalOne.
It’s a solid offering overall. There are probably many startups that are looking for a simple corporate card solution with a cash-back program. And the fact that Ramp wants to help you spend less shows that the startup cares more about providing a good user experience over generating quick revenue.
Source: TechCrunch
