How AI can help build smarter systems for every team with Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh of Ramp

**Sarah** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, and welcome to No priors. Today, we're here with Eric and Karim, the co-founders of Ramp, one of the fastest growing fintech companies of all time. We'll talk about the path to self-driving money, how they make AI and systems thinking fundamental to every part of Ramp, and why using AI in financial services is not as risky as people might think. Welcome, Eric and Karim.

**Elad** (0:28)
Well, today we're super excited to have Eric and Karim from Ramp joining us. So thank you so much for coming.

**Eric Glyman** (0:32)
Thanks for having us. It's great to see you both.

**Elad** (0:34)
If you could tell us all about the origins of Ramp, how you all got started, what you're focused on today, what roles you play at the company.

**Eric Glyman** (0:39)
Ramp in some ways is the sequel or taking our last business forward. We'd started about a decade ago to a business called Paribas. Back in 2015, I would probably reframe it now as an AI agent company. Essentially, what it did is, let's say you bought something from Amazon, Best Buy, Macy's, whatever.
Every store would guarantee that the next week the TV went on sale, you could get the difference back if you asked. We built it was an e-mail app. We scanned your inbox for receipts, we detected what you bought, and if you were eligible for a price drop refund, we wrote an e-mail as you, or chatted with the store as you to ask for the difference. They would respond, give you the difference, and we charged a cut. We launched this within a year, we had almost a million members, and we had a life-changing offer from Capital One to buy the company. So we were thinking a lot about first, how do you turn data into savings? We didn't know the first thing about credit cards, we learned it, we saw it was a great large industry, very profitable, but deeply misaligned with customers. People were obsessing over the question of how do you get people to spend more money or more points, and we got very interested in the question of if you actually listen to people, they don't want points or cash back, they actually want more in their bank account, the best way to do it is not get people to spend, we get people to not put differently, like not spending $100 in the first place is 100 times better than getting $1 or 1% back on it. And so we got obsessed with, wow, what if you put Parabas in a card? What if you had a card in software that was designed to get people to spend less in the first place, that seems more aligned with customers, a different way to go to market, and fundamentally a better product. And so back in March of 2019, we incorporated the company, today we're just shy of five and a half years old, and I would say a lot of what we're working towards today is this question of can you have self-driving money in an organization? Can you build really the primitives? From one place, issue cards, make payments of all kinds, manage approvals, even automate accounting. But really what we're doing is when you have the right primitives, abstracting away all the tedium of you don't need to add receipts to a transaction. You tap a card, we pull the receipt from your email and you're done. You don't need to tag every transaction and how it should be booked in your books and records and so today 25,000 businesses use it from small startups to Shopify, to Boys and Girls Club of America, to farms, to anything in between and so that's how we got into it, what we do and I'm CEO and run a lot of the business functions, Karim's CTO, of course technical, but also we can get into it overseas, even marketing other functions that we see, think are becoming more technical.

**Sarah** (3:15)
It's been an amazing run over five years. A lot of the value you're talking about are, as you said, for organizations. I remember talking to you guys when you were just getting started, you were kind of discovering that there was all this value in businesses and how businesses spend instead of your first company was more consumer oriented. How did you decide to make that shift and learning about that audience, investing in it?

**Karim Atiyeh** (3:38)
I'd say a lot of the ideation phase of Ramp, we were talking to a lot of our friends, people in our community and it just so happens that a lot of them were either starting early-stage companies or joining early-stage companies. A lot of the problems that we're facing at a larger scale were some of the ones that we're trying to solve for consumers first.