Take Flight

Earlier this week, Saquon Barkley signed a two-year, $41.2M contract that made him the highest paid running back of all time.

The Philadelphia Eagles brought out the Brinks truck for Barkley, and rightfully so, considering his contribution to their dominance at the 2025 Super Bowl.

Last season, Barkley rushed for 2,504 yards, breaking the previous single-season record held by Terrell Davis (2,476 yards). To top it off, he won the NFL Offensive Player of the Year and was named First Team All-Pro.

His Super Bowl appearance was not limited to the field, however.

Saquon starred in a Super Bowl commercial for Ramp.

This is not your typical athlete-startup activation, or even celebrity-startup activation for that matter. Athletes tend to lend their name, image, and likeness to sports-tech, consumer, or fast food franchises they have vested interests in. Red Bull, Papa John’s, Nike, Tonal, etc.

Alignment is the name of the game; people get suspicious when celebrities endorse products without expertise or relevant use cases.

Ramp isn’t worried about perception when it comes to athlete advertising.

Saquon was actually the one who reached out to Ramp’s CEO, Eric Glyman, after reading Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. He heard great things about the company through investors in his circle and decided to invest himself after meeting Glyman.

Ramp has been building out a roster of athlete partners to bring brand exposure.

Before Saquon, there was Neal Shipley.

Neal is a 23-year-old golfer who won a spot in the 2024 Master’s Tournament after he finished as a runner-up in the 2023 U.S. Amateur.

A real underdog but somehow shot 1-over-par-73 to finish under 12 and receive an award as Low Amateur. Neal was 1 of 8 golfers at the Masters sponsored by Ramp.

Shipley’s March Madness-esque Cinderella story combined with meme-worthy expressions led to Ramp’s single biggest day of traffic on April 24, 2024. We don’t know how much they paid Neal but something tells us it’s not enough… elite ROI.

Earlier this week, Ramp:

• more than doubled annualized revenue to $700M

• almost doubled valuation to $13B in a secondary share sale

• secured a legacy as one of the fastest growing startups in history (est. 2019)

To put it in perspective, this is like Jokic’s MVP run from 2021 - 2024, but if he won 3 rings.

Or like Barry Bonds MVP run from 2001 - 2004, but with 3 rings.

Or MJ from 1990 to 1993.

You get the point.

Now let’s talk about what Ramp actually does

Eric Glyman met Karim Atiyeh at Harvard.

Eric was studying Economics with a minor in East Asian Studies while Karim was more technically inclined, doing a joint bachelors-masters program in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science.

They launched their first company in 2014, a little bit after graduating. Glyman was working as a financial analyst at Millstein & Co., and Karim was a consultant at Oliver & Wyman.

The company was called Paribus.

In Latin, ceteris paribus means “all other things held equal”.

Paribus started when Eric felt frustrated about buying plane tickets and seeing the price drop days after the purchase. He felt like consumers should be able to take advantage of good deals retroactively… and after reading the fine print, he realized that there was a way. So he founded Paribus to automate the process for the everyday consumer.

Paribus benefited from the trends of (1a) Amazon / e-commerce reaching new heights and (1b) the constant price changes on Amazon.

In 2016, Karim and Eric had just finished Y-Combinator’s accelerator program when they got acquired by Capital One, where Paribus got converted into Capital One Shopping.

• Paribus had 700,000 users at the time

Post-acquisition, they worked at Capital One on the Capital One Shopping product up until March 2019. This is when they left to start Ramp, bringing along Capital One engineer, Gene Lee.

Before building, the team met with 100 finance experts and entrepreneurs to validate their idea. The biggest finding from that process was that companies were just as interested in saving time as they were saving money. Companies were experiencing high levels of inefficiency around saving expenses and logging receipts, and the required software was fragmented into separate tools that wasted time for employees.

The pandemic stimulated growth for Ramp.

Traditional credit cards offer travel points and lounge access that keep customers happy regardless of inefficiencies associated with said cards. But the pandemic - which halted travel almost completely - gave Ramp a window of time to get a foot in the door. Customers only cared about getting cash back and saving time, two things Ramp did well.

Another edge Ramp cultivated early was hiring the best talent. Leadership obsessed over recruiting former and future founders: out of the first 60 employees, 1 out of every 3 had founded a company before.

Glyman and Atiyeh were intentional about working with people who had unrealistic expectations around shipping product at a fast pace. They wanted the company to be a training lab for the next great founders of this generation.

Businesses spend, on average, $80 per employee on corporate credit cards.

Ramp’s first product was a business charge card with 1.5% unlimited cash back, free to use, with no interest or late fees.

Ramp’s software made it easy for businesses to control spend by restricting vendors where the card would be accepted, setting spend limits by division, and enforcing auto-lock dates.

It all goes back to Ramp’s mantra of saving time and money, which is what they realized customers actually wanted during the user research phase.

Ramp cards are seamlessly integrated into their expense management software, something that other corporate cards fail to do. So when Jack spends $34 on Sweetgreen, he doesn’t need to get a receipt and upload the expense to a different expense management software, which, over the course of an entire year, eats up more time than businesses would like.

Additionally, for expenses that require receipts from compliance, Ramp:

• uses optical character recognition (OCR) to read receipts with 90%+ accuracy

• enables customers to create auto-generated receipts

• prevents finance teams from having to verify receipts manually

Ramp effectively used the corporate card as a wedge to launch software around the entire transaction ecosystem.

In addition to expense management, Ramp has launched:

• Ramp Bill Pay (2021)

• Ramp Travel (2022)

• Price Intelligence (2024)

• and more

Ramp makes money by (a) premium subscriptions and (b) transaction fees on their card.

Check out this growth curve illustrating Ramp’s meteoric rise:

In year 6, Ramp is now at $700M ARR and a $13B valuation after a secondary sale.

The venture capital secondary market will only continue to expand in both transaction volume and transparency.

According to Pitchbook, the past few years have seen significant growth in secondaries:

• 2022: $87B

• 2023: $103B

• 2024: $114B

A couple of factors contribute to increased appetite, but at the end of the day, companies are simply staying private longer.

SpaceX is worth $350B on the private market, OpenAI is worth $300B on the private market, Stripe is worth $70B on the private market, Databricks is worth $62B on the private market, Anthropic is worth $60B, xAI is at $50B… so on and so forth.

Investment banks and larger financial institutions have begun to take notice and are building new business lines to support the largest late stage “startups”.

Earlier this year, David Solomon spoke at the Cisco AI Summit and told startups to reconsider going public.

He noted that startups can scale to public market company size without the hassle of being publicly traded. Which seems weird considering Goldman is arguably the leading IPO bookrunner in the world…

But makes sense when you realize they enjoy going downstream and helping large private companies raise financing. Goldman worked on Stripe’s $6.5B raise in 2023, among other deals.

Goldman isn’t alone on this.

• JP Morgan acquired Aumni in 2023. Aumni gives the bank exposure to venture capital data which will likely power their secondaries unit. JP paid $400M for Aumni, a 100x revenue multiple.

• Blackrock acquired Preqin in 2024 for $3.2B. The asset manager will use Preqin to enhance their private markets capabilities.

As companies continue to stay private and investors continue to thirst for liquidity, there exists a clear opportunity to simplify transparent access to secondaries.

Headlines

• Colossal breeds woolly mice on its journey to breed woolly mammoths. TIME

• A quarter of startups in YC’s current cohort have codebases that are almost entirely AI-generated. Techcrunch

• OpenAI plans to charge $20,000 a month for PhD level agents. Techcrunch

• Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is launching at new social network at SXSW. Fortune

• Sam Bankman-Fried says Diddy has been kind to him in an interview with Tucker Carlson. NY Mag

• Stephen A. Smith signs $100M deal with ESPN. FOS

• Dana White says he can fix boxing with new promotion in partnership with Saudis. AP

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