The video explores the journey of the fintech company, Ramp, and its predecessors, Paribus. The narrative reveals how the founders used innovative technology to create a service that automatically secures price-drop refunds for users, an idea that emerged from the need to handle fluctuating consumer prices better. The story takes viewers through Paribus's journey from its inception, struggles, overcoming barriers including initial rejection from Y Combinator, to achieving significant growth by saving consumers $15 billion annually in unclaimed refunds, attracting attention from large companies.

Transitioning from Paribus to the creation of Ramp, the video outlines Ramp's emergence as a leading fintech player with its novel corporate card solution. The segment highlights Ramp’s rapid ascent in the market, integrating expense management and automating financial workflows. The emphasis is on the phenomenal growth the company experienced and the key strategies that propelled their valuation from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, emphasizing innovation and speed as crucial differentiators in a competitive landscape.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. refunds [ˈriːfʌndz] - (noun) - The repayment of a sum of money, typically to a dissatisfied customer. - Synonyms: (reimbursements, repayments, returns)

Believe it or not, about $15 billion worth of refunds go unclaimed every year.

2. inception [ɪnˈsɛpʃən] - (noun) - The establishment or starting point of an institution or activity. - Synonyms: (beginning, commencement, outset)

So, mechanically, what we would do is we would send emails on behalf of customers to the retailers to get the difference.

3. incubator [ˈɪŋkjəˌbeɪtər] - (noun) - An organization or facility that supports the growth and development of new businesses or business ideas. - Synonyms: (hatchery, accelerator, startup hub)

Y Combinator is perhaps the most prestigious startup incubator in the world.

4. fintech [ˈfɪnˌtɛk] - (noun) - Technology used to improve, automate, and enhance financial services. - Synonyms: (financial technology, digital finance, fintech industry)

Talk to us a little bit about Ramp's business, what you do, and why it's important in the fintech landscape.

5. arbitrage [ˈɑrbɪˌtrɑʒ] - (noun) - The practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets. - Synonyms: (exploitation, profit, gain)

Just to know, is there something there? Is there an arbitrage opportunity?

6. disperse [dɪˈspɜrs] - (verb) - Distribute or spread over a wide area. - Synonyms: (scatter, distribute, diffuse)

Really what we're focused on is workflows that companies need to run in order to disperse funds.

7. autopilot [ˈɔtəˌpaɪlət] - (noun) - A setting that allows a machine or program to operate automatically. - Synonyms: (automatic control, self-control, automatic mechanism)

And the idea of just, like, saving money and time on autopilot is universal.

8. macroclimate [ˌmækroʊˈklaɪmət] - (noun) - The large-scale environmental and economic conditions affecting an industry or market. - Synonyms: (global climate, large-scale environment, broad conditions)

They've been able to deal with a macroclimate wherever, you know, most companies, by default.

9. perseverance [ˌpɜrsəˈvɪrəns] - (noun) - Continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition. - Synonyms: (persistence, determination, tenacity)

We looked at each other like after the first application and neither of us wanted to give up.

10. rote [roʊt] - (adjective) - Habitual or mechanical memorization or repetition, often without understanding. - Synonyms: (mechanical, repetitive, monotonous)

We have saved thousands of years of human labor, of rote tasks that no longer needs to get done.

Mastering Fintech Ramp's Revolutionary Rise to Success

Take up the email and send it out to Kareem that day. Wednesday, August 7, 2013. It's a service that monitors price drops, secures refunds for you whenever prices drop. If the price of a flight drop, the app could normalize down the price and refund you the difference. We got together that night. We applied to YC. We actually didn't get into y combinator the first time, and neither of us wanted to give up. It's like, all right, let's do it again. We'll try again in six months. And we basically built the first AI agents before it was a thing automatically writing an email that sounded like it came from a human automatically parsing the response. Believe it or not, about $15 billion worth of refunds go unclaimed every year. One startup is fixing that. Paribus, an online service that automatically gets you money back when something you've already bought goes on sale, on average within 20 days. So it's a very quick journey where we raised, scaled very fast, and then sold the company.

Probably the first version of ramp was, what if you built Paribus for your businesses? As soon as I met them, I knew they were the real deal. They had the right vision. We were going to save companies employees time and money. Really what we're focused on is workflows that companies need to run in order to disperse funds, close their books, and everything in between. I think every aspect of a CFO's job, I think, could actually live within Ramp. The only financial tool that you use for effectively everything. Talk to us a little bit about Ramp's business, what you do, and why it's important in the fintech landscape. Today, we offer the fastest growing corporate card in America, with built in expense management, bill payments, and accounting automation. And the impact that we drive for companies is we help the average company spend 3.3% less each year and close their books eight times faster.

On paper, we went from worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the start in January of 2021, to by the close of that year, the company was worth over $8 billion. I think that combination of the software with the physical card just enabled them to move a lot faster, grow a lot faster, grow in a more capital efficient way. We launched, actually five years ago to the day. We have saved thousands of years of human labor, of rote tasks that no longer needs to get done, so that people can ultimately spend all of their time being creative, all of their time running their business. We were in that phase of, I think, what a lot of startup founders were trying to do, which was to come up with ideas out of the blue. And they were all terrible, just like, hanging out a lot. Like, neither of us were really thrilled with our jobs that were both very demanding. And for me, I felt like, I don't know, was making me a little, like, not that smart.

We booked a trip to go travel somewhere the next day. A friend wanted to join and I went to go send her the flight, and it was very bizarre. The same flight that we had just booked 12 hours before was going for dollar 100 less and was like, this has got to be weird, and closed the window and opened it and checked it again. And it was actually right then, before he knew it, we had $1,000 back, you know, the whole group. And I just sat there and I said, you know, I wish I knew. I wish there was some software service that would have told me that this change was out there. And I sent it out to Kareem that day. Wednesday, August 7, 2013 it's a service that monitors price drops, secures refunds for you whenever prices drop on things you've purchased. Play on the rise of big data. If the price of a flight dropped, rather than having to get on the phone and haggle with customer service representative for the discount, the app could generate an auto query to normalize down the price and refund you the difference. Thoughts would be great if you could keep the idea between me and you for now.

That sounds great, man. Space exclamation point. We should definitely talk about this. Flights didn't make a lot of sense because flight prices tend to go up as you get closer to the date, but electronics made sense. Those prices tend to go down over time. The very first version was almost like an excel sheet. Just to know, is there something there? Is there an arbitrage opportunity? People forget it. Showrooming was the this big problem in retail where people would go to a best buy and then buy it on Amazon or somewhere else online. It was such an issue that everyone would guarantee that they would match others prices. If it's better online, you could buy it in store. Or if there was price drop the next week you get the difference. And Amazon went, I think, over that time from changing 50,000 prices per day to when we sold the business.

They were changing reportedly about half a billion prices every single day. There was a huge opportunity, it turned out, to help people automatically get price adjustments. We track the prices of the items you bought from your inbox and we automatically reach out to stores on your behalf to get you a refund whenever the price drops or you missed a coupon or you missed a discount. No one had ever used email in this way where you could scan the inbox for receipts, check prices, and then there was an option to actually, you could send emails and be someone's agent to do things on their behalf. And the reason we can do this is because most stores actually have these policies, but no one really holds them accountable for it.

I mean, we basically built the first AI agents before it was a thing. You could have this really aligned business model where you could identify ways for everyone to automatically save, manage the interactions back and forth between you and the retailer in charge to cut, but eventually turn into that business. Y Combinator is perhaps the most prestigious startup incubator in the world. It's funded more than 700 companies to date, including Dropbox, Airbnb and Stripe. We applied to Y combinator with ten customers and we got promptly rejected. It was very theoretical. We probably spent more time in the DaX and we said, you know what, let's just go and build this thing. We looked at each other like after the first application and neither of us wanted to give up. It was like, all right, let's do it again.

We'll try again in six months. And we actually made a lot of progress. You know, we reapplied. I think it was six months later, we had almost 1000 customers and we had real savings and got in and did TechCrunch disrupt, and the rest started running from there. Everyone loves getting a deal. People love the thrill of finding exactly what you want and paying less than you should. Believe it or not, about $15 billion worth of refunds go unclaimed every year. One startup is fixing that Paribus, an online service that automatically gets you money back when something you've already bought goes on sale. User it feels like magic. You link your inbox and then all of a sudden you start saving money on everything that you buy online. I'm pretty sure we were one of the fastest growing businesses full stop out of Y combinator that summer.

And we went from 500,000 users to 25,000 over course. It was like, it was true, 20% plus, you know, weekly growth consistently. You know, for the summer it didn't slow down. And our dream was, what if we could be on Good Morning America or today shows is a really simple way to help you save money. And I think I must have emailed a producer. She probably was sick of me, I think 40, 50 times. Right now. Shopping is hard. Prices are changing hundreds of millions of times per day. With parabens, just buy what you want. We'll take care of everything else. So if the price drops, you get me the refund. That's right. From there, things really rocketed off. It melted our servers with a truly. We went down almost for a little bit of just how much came through. Today's show Lester Holt ended up covering. We're on ABC World News, and I think by the next May, we went from 20,000 to half a million users.

As a result of that, we were making a lot of very big retailers very upset and very angry. So mechanically, what we would do is we would send emails on behalf of customers to the retailers to get the difference. It ended up creating a lot of loyalty for some customers. But there was one retailer in particular was a big problem. That was Amazon. They changed more prices by orders of magnitude than the rest of the industry combined. And first we ended up getting a cease and desist from them telling us to quit what we were doing. It was hard. It was hard to deal with all these cease and desist letters and the retailers trying to block us, either technically or through, I guess legal means the number one place that we were getting refunds from had. Was gone overnight. And our revenue I think dropped by probably 80% over the course of a week.

And around that same time, we're toying around with the idea of raising more funding. But we never felt like the investors that were around the table really got the idea on what we were trying to do there. There was this realization at one of our partners, ultimately capital one, that said, actually we don't just want to partner with your team. We love to buy the company that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet from start to finish, from idea to closing was three years, which is really unusually fast. Most banks, their founders actually wore top hats. You know, they started in like 1850s, seventies, long in the ground, the people who built the thing. But capital one was the one major financial institution where that is not the case. I just remember feeling as the world went by and went from no phones to flip phones to iPhones, your credit card itself, maybe there's innovation, how it got delivered to you and who could qualify for it and what lounges you could access.

But credit card didn't really change over the past 40 years. Bank account really changed and it wasn't really aligned with customers. So we really started from a lens of like, okay, what are we excited about? And you kind of come up with ideas and are those really good ideas? There was something interesting to trying to build pairbis for businesses. And the idea of just, like, saving money and time on autopilot is universal. Who wouldn't want that? And I think it does attract, like, very talented people. It's like, we're gonna raise money, do something really, really big, and that's the only way we'll do it this time. We're not gonna stop. And so the early version of ramp was sort of, hey, there's clearly something here in corporate credit cards nobody's thinking about, how do I save the CFO money if we just did what we did at Paribus but applied it to enterprises? I can go to a CFO and say, hey, I can save you five to 10% of your, like, travel entertainment budget basically overnight, let alone everything else that I can do.

In some ways, it felt like the company could get all of the upside with very little, basically, of the downside. With Paribus, we're helping consumers save money, and we're gonna build a platform around that. And then seeing all the challenges with commercial and expense management, that was really the idea. We can help these companies save money. We can see, like, they're paying this vendor. They're paying for all these subscriptions. Deli Nasburoff and I were searching for founders who could implement the vision that I had in the back of my brain. It's true. You met Delian through Fortnite playing, and he became friends. And I think that delian kind of had heard that Kareem was working on something, and I was like, hey, I happen to encounter this random guy on Fortnite that I think is interesting. And Keith was encouraging me, like, okay, go pursue it.

We are really intrigued, basically, by this idea. Let's go chase it down. Dalian was part of the group of people I was playing video games with, and I think at some point, I I told him, like, hey, I'm gonna be playing a lot less. Like, I'm gonna get serious. And he said he came into the office the next day, and he's like, hey, Keith, I think I found your founders for you. I was like, okay, sure. And so they flew out from New York, Eric and cream, and they walked me through their vision, which was right down the middle of what I had been envisioning. And so literally on the spot in the meeting, I was like, delian, very good. You found the right ones. We're doing this. And we gave him a term sheet that day. Early on, we could just tell with Eric and Kareem. I mean, they were super visionary in terms of what they wanted to do.

And given that they had already sold a company, obviously, they were super young at the time, so, you know, there's some questions about that, and. But really, they had this idea of ramp and what they wanted to accomplish, and I believed in it from. From the get go. This was a time in my life where, like, I had no money at all. So, like, any money, I would put into stuff like startups, like. Like, not money for food, but this is one of the very few. I'm like, I like him so much and know him so well. It wasn't actually even about, oh, I think this company will do well or not. This is an honor for him to do this. So I'm gonna put in the money that I don't have. It was just one of those, like, you meet Eric and you want to invest. There's no way that you don't want to believe he's going to build something massive that is good for everyone. And, you know, like, it's hard to not walk away from a conversation with him thinking, I'm.

He's a good person. He has big vision, and he's extremely capable. The business that I'm in is investing in founders, not necessarily just their companies. And so it always just came back to, like, you got to meet Eric, and you'll see he's something special, and you got to meet the team. They're just like, very good. The first piece I wrote about them was December 2020, and there's a whole section just on how nice Eric was, because, like, it ties into this idea that you're building a corporate card company that helps people spend less money, which is strategically smart, but also, like, just kind of had to be the brainchild of somebody like an Eric and Kareem. So that was the first encounter with them. When we did raise money from Keith, the one thing that we were very clear on is that the people we wanted to hire and why we wanted to hire them.

And the guest who's joining us now is not only a psychologically wise leader himself, but he looks to develop psychologically wise leaders to put them out into the world. What's really important here, I would call it the density of top talent that ramp has. That is an incredible competitive advantage. I remember Kareem grilling me, and I don't remember exactly which questions he asked, but I remember I just immediately liked Kareem a lot. And I think he's a very critical thinker. The success of the company speaks for itself. Right. It shows that Eric and Karim have been a very good duo. Eric is more about the general direction. Motivating the employees career was definitely more technical. I cold emailed like five to ten startups that were in New York and Eric was one of the few to reply. Actually might have been the only one to reply.

I first heard about Ramp probably a year to a year and a half before that through a few investor friends of mine. They were just sort of talking about Eric and Kareem and the very early and very clear talent density assembled in this building and the amazing product traction. Ramp was very quickly kind of in the upper echelon of names that were getting thrown around. Secondly, they are insane about velocity. I think they both share the belief that speed kills and that is kind of in many ways, the core differentiator for ramp historically. We need to preserve that going forward. Even as we grow. We like to see someone grapple with that question, how would you actually go monetize this? What's the most effective way to, to do so?

What really stood out to me about ramp is one just, yeah, the vision, the ability to go and build a credit card the right way and us to actually build real good software. That's why a lot of people join a startup. The ability to, yeah, potentially be part of something huge. You know, I shut off Zoom and I was like, wow, this is legit. You know, when I first joined the company, I was shocked that they of them in a room review every single person who the team recommends that we hire and frequently push back and ask more questions. I think there's an element of, like, when products are getting built at Ramp, zero to one, they're pretty much built in a silo. And we kind of figure out the connections between these products after they reach product market fit or maturity. A big part of why we're able to build all these products is, like our engineering team, incredible.

And we've been able, I think, to make the right decisions. On the product side, many people talk about being customer centric, but the reality is Ramp executes on that customer centric mission. Ramp executes on product innovation. It was May of that year with Keith, the founders fund team, July 29 of 2019, and I think it was the 133rd day of the company. We wrote that because the company was so young. It was our. It was our first meeting, and so we wanted to say, look, this is what we've done in 133 days within, call it 45 days. And I don't think there was any company who had done anything close to the speed that we did. It within 45 days, we were approved by our partner bank. I think within 50, we were approved by the credit card network visa. By day, 60 or 70 of the company, we were actually processing transactions live, completely unheard of for any company to move that quickly.

The company has always been on the right trajectory. We haven't even burned the amount we were supposed to in the plan for a quarter in five years, because the company's trajectory has just been so efficient. And this is very rare. I think it happens once every ten years in tech, where a company just has kind of a smooth ride. I think the first virtual transaction might have been in June. I was on the phone with Gene, who was back in the office, and I walked to this, like, vietnamese restaurant in New York. He's like, well, I want to pay my credit card, but I don't actually have it on me. Can I give you the card number maybe? Like, yeah, I'm a fraudster. Like, I stole some card number from the Internet. And then I explained to him that, like, you know, I actually, this is my card company.

And, like, he looks at me even weirder. What are you talking about? And I'm giving him the card number, the CVV number, and he enters it, and it works. That was the first ramp transaction. So it was really an honor and a privilege to have been a part of that. I mean, really, like, we may have even had, like, friendly customers before we could even print plastic cards. Frankly, every week, we were making so many improvements. The quality of the interface was improving. We were now capturing more types of receipts. We were allowing you to issue, like, yeah, special purpose cards that are, like, mapped to, like, only one retailer. There was an oil change business, somebody who is a family man, an entrepreneur who had a dream. He started with one location. The business had no idea how to track and accurately forecast all the business expenses.

And they were like, this is such an amazing product, and we want to roll this into our playbook of businesses across the Southeast. As complicated as the creative stuff was, the business side, that was new to me. So there are a million things. You have bookkeepers. All of a sudden you have bankers that you're talking to. You have a bunch of employees you need to pay. You have your rippling or whatever other HR type software that you're using to work with your employees and get all their paperwork and shit in order. Every single one of those things, it takes away from your ability to run the company creatively. You have less time, I guess. But at first, it was just straight up like, I need a corporate card. I reached out to Amex because their card looks cool.

And, like, that was kind of it. I was like, yeah, that's a cool card. I want that card. And they just didn't even respond. Just like, the sort of deafening silence from these people was really frustrating to me. And then I just thought, wait, why am I not just trying rap? I hit them up. And that afternoon, I had everything that I, that I needed. Before you knew it, we had, I think, by the end of the month, you know, almost 500 customers, something like that, just an amazing surge. We worked so hard that week that, you know, half the office got sick that next week, you know, we didn't know exactly why. And I think kind of the next turning point for us was the beginning of March.

We really figured out why when the whole city shut down, you know, and then, you know, we learned why everyone got sick. Fast breaking developments. The coronavirus pandemic spreads the number of cases soaring. 2020 is now the deadliest year in us history. Being able to flex and say, can you hear my metal card? Slammed down on the table, all was great, but suddenly you're at home and you have no idea when it's come out. None of those things matter. Is your business going to make it to the next one? They were worried about whether they could go into work and pay their bills. So the world had completely changed. I mean, we were so, like, just focused on, like, the internals of the company. They're like, almost, we had, like, a blinders on and a little bit, like a oblivious to what was happening.

A lot of businesses were kind of running a little blind. Like, they had no idea like, where and what they were spending money on. And ramp just had, like, we had built, like, a very, very good integrations with your accounting system. People were, like, worried about, like, spending money left and right on things that they didn't need and didn't matter. The product had unbelievable fit, and we were growing consistently 30, 40% per month. At the end of 2020, we were the first and became, ultimately, we believe, best in class of being truly fully integrated. Expense management cards, reimbursements, accounting automations. You could just use ramp and it save you not just a lot of money, but actually demonstrate a lot of time. You know, we grew on a small base. And then 2021, that was the year everyone knows.

And think about it, there was zero interest rates. By January, we became a billion dollar company. We were becoming the market leader in the startup ecosystem, and we started to grow the ambitions of the company. The speed of execution, the velocity of execution at ramp is so impressive that when they skated out their big picture vision, they've accomplished most of the initial vision in less than five years. I've been doing this for 23 years, and I had never seen anybody put together these programs that fast. They've been able to deal with a macroclimate wherever, you know, most companies, by default, are shrinking or flat. Ramp has had basically its most successful year in 2023. While effectively like burning nothing, 2021 was all about still continuing to lean in to figure out how to continue to grow out our lead gen channels and then build out and structure our sales and post sales teams in a way that would lead to a repeatable, go to market machine.

So, like, 2020 is about, let's just try things and see what sticks. 2021 is okay. We found a couple things that stick. Now let's scale this and figure out how to make this more of a machine. And that continued through 2022. 2023. Just like continuing to iterate. We were actually meeting with a company. The CEO of the company said, hold on, guys, you know, I can't do this right now. Basically, we need to open up new bank accounts. We need to, like, move money. So sorry. Alarm outside headquarters of Silicon Valley bank in Santa Clara, California.

The biggest bank collapse since the 2008 financial crisis. And this is really the epicenter of tech startups, venture capital. Customers of Silicon Valley bank lined up to make sure that they can get their money. It's not clear if they're going to get all of their money back. Growing possibility of a recession. Wall street spent another day in turmoil. Eric's first reaction was, he just shot down. He just did not try to go into pitching ramp at all. He immediately went into service mode. I was on twitter and saw that it started to unfold, and it was on a Friday, all night. Friday in the office, all day Saturday in the office, all day Sunday in the office. Just onboarding. I was working that weekend to help them get onboarded. Fastest onboardings ever.

It's like we need cards now with very little sleep and lots of tension. As you can imagine, our backs were against the wall on behalf of our customers. We didn't know what was gonna happen. There were a lot of people who were worried about how ramp would show up for them. There were customers who, their businesses would go under. More people would get fired if they couldn't actually help reduce the spend right away. Automation of workflows. There was finance teams who went from ten down to five to four overnight. And so automation became incredibly important, and I think as the rest of the industry stagnated, ramp continued to grow. Ramp has never had a layoff. Our narrative got stronger than ever, and the mood in the office was like, wow, we're all here helping companies. Everything we did around vendor intelligence, price intelligence, helping reduce wasteful spend, I mean, it just flew off the shelves, and it really gave us this mood of like, all right, we're gonna attack this mission together.

It's actually helped us really even strengthen our value prop and note, hey, we're here to help our customers actually be really prudent about what they do with their money and get ahead of potentially needing to take drastic measures to save the business. This environment for fundraising, you've got it, you've got the money, but you have significantly cut your valuation. Why do that? And so the way it happened was, we just said, look, all we want to know is the lynch investors. We want to know the truth. What do you believe ramp is worth? How do you underwrite it? How do you think about it? We walk through both the growth of the business, future plans for it, and we said, the reason we want to do this is, look, there's been people working for this company for years who haven't been able to sell a dollar. It's not for me, it's not for careems, not for the founders.

This is for employees to, you know, might believe deeply in the company, but need to send a kid through college or want to buy a home, whatever it is, and have the ability to do that. What would you value it at? And it came back at less. I believe both investors in ramp as an example, which is an unbelievable business and a very, very good founder. And to his credit, you know, took a solid down round relative to the previous one, although it's still like an incredible valuation on a very good business. And so, you know, even the best companies are dealing with this. I think there are many ways that that could have been interpreted as a sort of weak point. Oh, the company had to raise a down round, and I think he was able to actually frame it as an extremely strong point for the company.

I think they did a really good job of being one of the first in the market to just say, look, we're going to take our medicine, we're going to reprice. I think the whole thing ties back again. And that, like, double unicorn round. I talked about just taking the long term view, being first out into the market to say, like, look, it's actually not that bad compared to the market where, like, public comps are down 70% we're down 30% or 40% or whatever. The. The actual number ended up being even. Eric and Kareem sat in the office for 2 hours. They did a company wide, all hands, kind of a town hall. They let anyone from the company ask questions. And remember Eric doing the bottoms up capital asset pricing model equation to show why this current valuation was actually a stronger conviction play than our previous valuation was.

So we continue to expand the product suite, we continue to expand the types of customers we can target. So we started off with smaller businesses, and we've grown into the middle of the market and even dabbled in enterprise. So over the course of the next five years, I think we'll be able to target ever more interesting businesses as well as potentially international. I mean, it's been one of the fastest growing startups ever in fintech, which is amazing. But one of the reasons why it's thriving is because of the core values of being customer centric, being product centric, operating with integrity, and very importantly, I know Eric and team are very focused on building trust. I think we need to continue to focus on what we've been doing and why we're winning. And, you know, for lack of a better term, pour fuel on the fire. Like we've, we've got the motion down.

We know why our customers are successful, and we need to, we need to keep executing. The thing that ramp is trying to do is become a giant business in 2040. We will make decisions with kind of what is most equity value maximizing. Two decades from now, we're playing a very, very long game. We have very big ambitions, but the big picture vision of Ramp was, and still is, we want to seamlessly integrate all the data that a company spends money on, all the places money goes, and give the CFO an autopilot view of what's going on, and allow the CFO to intelligently pull levers. So it really is the future of a CFO, is what ramp's building.

We have saved thousands of years of human labor, of rote tasks that no longer needs to get done. Ultimately, we believe that we are our customers. We want to have a fiduciary like relationship. We care and believe we should help them spend less money, we should help them spend less time. And as you have the ability of software to go do things in your interest and on your behalf, and the capability of computing to help you close your books faster, to help you get the goods and services that you're buying at lower rates, to help even internally facilitate the tasks that are needed to operate a business so that people can ultimately spend all of their time being creative, all of their time running their business. Everything they're doing on growth is what we care about and where we want to go. So our strategy hasn't actually changed that much. It's just that a lot of the bets that we had placed and that we have been placing over the past year and a half are starting to pay off.

The scope of our ambition has increased, but the attention to detail and quality of execution is still the same. When the market shifts and a lot of people are struggling around you just go, I guess part by part, look at where to try to identify the bottlenecks. We are still growing faster than any public company that I can think of at a similar scale of revenue. The headline you'll see is that ramp raised new funds at a $7.5 billion valuation round was co led by founders Fund and Khosla. We grew faster on a percentage basis in Q one of of this year than we did last year. The focus for this round has been on just bringing on folks that can add a lot to the table, help increase our chances of success. A lot of our existing investors are more than excited to double down in many cases. Of course, founders Fund is joining in on the round so it's thrive. So is general Catalyst.

Keith helped us set up a meeting with Vinod and Vinod is obviously incredible. Incredibly bullish on was incredibly bullish on our thesis. Obviously we're incredibly thrilled about that and why new investors sequoia Greylock, eight BC are excited to join and works at announced for the first time they're a part of the team. These folks are more key investors that are known for their vision and not in the business of making small returns. It was less than a decade ago that Karim and I were just two recent grads out of college, working at jobs that we like but hoping for something more and it's been amazing. A lot of people kind of came together and poured their heart into building the company. A lot of investors took a big shot on us when it wasn't easy or popular or obvious and frankly, we still have a lot to live up to. Excited to be here, but we want to keep working and get back to work and delivering more each week.

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