Fintech has exploded in popularity over the past five years. Startups in this category raised more than $350 million in VC funding from 2019 to 2023, according to CB Insights data. Despite all this growth, Ramp co-founder and CEO Eric Gilman believes the industry and companies like his have only scratched the surface.
Griman recently told TechCrunch Found's podcast that despite how much his unicorn card and expense startup has grown so far, it's only tapped into 1% of its potential market share. Ta.
“Although we have grown rapidly, we still have more than 99% of the market in our largest card market,” Greiman said. “So some of this is really just, we want to bring the magic to more companies.” [so that] Calculating expenses can be effortless and radically simpler. ”
Despite the rapid growth of the fintech category over the past few years, Greiman started building his first fintech startup before the hype cycle. Griman and current co-founder Karim Atiyeh launched their first fintech startup, Paribus, in 2014. The startup used AI to create emails that users send to stores to request a price change if their recently purchased item goes on sale. The company raised just $2 million before being acquired by Capital One.
Times have changed for fintech, and Greiman talked about what it's like to build and fund a fintech startup as the market has changed over the past decade.
Greiman also talked about changes in AI technology. When the team was building his Paribus, generative AI technology for creating emails was still relatively rudimentary, and the rest of the company's AI technology was built on very simple language models. Ta. For Ramp, the AI technology stack looks completely different.
“This is really deep. I think 10 years ago it would have been used for hyper-targeted use cases, but to this day there is no part of Ramp that hasn’t been influenced by AI. And I think that's going to continue to accelerate,” Greiman said.
Grimman also talked about how Ramp thinks about scaling and how the company is working to expand into new categories. Greiman said the company aims to fill the cracks and gaps that still exist and continue to emerge in customers' expense workflows. The company still has a long way to go.
“We believe this will help your work become more purposeful, never boring or monotonous, and more strategic, insightful, actionable, high-leverage, and creatively focused.” , I hope,” Greiman said. “So that's what we're trying to work on. And that was a lot of fun to get there.”
Ramp was founded in 2019 and is based in New York. The startup has raised more than $1.7 billion from venture capitalists and was last valued at $5.8 billion in August 2023.