Ramp

“Ramp powers more than 2% of all corporate and small business card transactions in the United States, which is amazing for a product that you couldn't sign up for six years ago.” Eric Glyman is the cofounder and CEO of Ramp, the finance automation platform that scaled to over $1 billion in revenue in just seven years. He sits down with John and co-host Alastair (Alex) Rampell to discuss how Ramp uses AI agents to review 100,000 expenses a day with 99% accuracy, and why the future of fintech is "selling time, not money." They cover the "SaaS apocalypse" and why their internal data suggests the US economy is much stronger than the Census Bureau reports. YouTube: https://lnkd.in/ecHF9sK8 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eJTpUeZq Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/e7x_pnQM Full transcript on Substack: https://lnkd.in/eBKs87se

There are two non-negotiables in accounting: the books must be correct, and they must be ready on time. For decades, companies have satisfied those constraints through an extraordinary amount of manual effort. Highly trained professionals code transactions, re-approve familiar expenses, reconcile mismatches after the fact, and compress all of it into the ritual of month-end close. It works. But it is fundamentally retrospective. Today, Ramp introduced an Accounting Agent designed around a different premise: what if bookkeeping happened as the business operated, rather than after it? The agent captures, codes, reviews, validates, accrues, and reconciles spend continuously. It learns directly from the people who understand the nuances best, the accounting team itself, and applies that context in real time. At Perplexity, where velocity is core to the company’s identity, this allowed their team to stop choosing between speed and accuracy. The majority of transactions are now coded automatically and audit-ready, enabling close to start on day one instead of day thirty. What’s been most striking is how the system learns the subtle, company-specific logic that historically lived only in human judgment. As Jim Romano, CFO at Stateside Brands, described it, the agent is already identifying patterns like when spend belongs in samples rather than travel and entertainment — the kinds of decisions that typically require institutional memory. As he put it, the goal is simple: finance teams should focus on exceptions, not the easy stuff. We’re also seeing the second-order effects emerge quickly. Teams report spending dramatically less time reviewing transactions and substantially more time on planning, analysis, and growth. As one CFO told us, “What used to take hours of manual review now happens. I’m spending nearly all of my time thinking about where the business should go, not retracing where it’s already been.” There is a broader shift underway in accounting. The central question is moving from “what parts of close can be automated?” to “should close even be an event at all?” One belief that guides our work at Ramp is that information latency inside companies is an invisible tax. When financial truth lags behind operational reality, organizations make slower and often worse decisions. As transaction data becomes inherently digital and systems become capable of learning institutional context, continuous close stops being aspirational and starts becoming inevitable. One thing that surprised us while building this: accounting isn’t constrained by a lack of rules — it’s constrained by how many of those rules are unwritten. Seeing software begin to absorb and apply that tacit knowledge has been a clear signal that accounting is entering a new phase. Accounting has always been the record for business reality. Our goal is to help it become closer to real-time truth. Proud of the team, and grateful to the customers building this alongside us.