Karim Atiyeh - Building Ramp - [Invest Like the Best, EP.445]

Ramp bets on AI agents to automate business finance

Ramp is betting that finance teams will run on software that automates their work. It started with a corporate card that cleaned up receipts, then added accounts payable and procurement, and now deploys AI agents that enforce expense policy and infer undocumented rules. Karim Atiyeh puts the market at over $100bn a year and expects payroll to become software spend.

Takeaways

• AI agents enforce expense policy around the clock. Ramp's policy agents integrate with calendar and email to enforce expense policy 24/7 and improve it over time. They check invoices for fraud and negotiated pricing, and Ramp infers undocumented policies from customer behaviour to build the next generation.
• Ramp builds consumer-grade UX for business software. Early differentiation was an email integration that identified receipt emails and tied them to card transactions. Ramp retries failed payments itself rather than asking customers to retry, and puts forms inside emails. The design obsession became minimising time in the app.
• Business spend market is $100bn plus. Ramp serves finance teams from startups to companies with over 100,000 employees, covering expenses, procurement, accounts payable, accounting and reporting. The stated market is over $100bn a year, and Karim Atiyeh predicts payroll spend becomes software spend as AI agents spread.
• AI adoption moves in three phases. The first phase uses LLMs to do the same work faster, as developers do with ChatGPT or Cursor. The second makes the LLM the product, where code becomes the LLM plus instructions and an infinite loop. Ramp's agents are the flagship.
• Ramp hires for spikiness and autonomy. Karim Atiyeh's main filter is whether he would join a company the candidate started. He wants to assemble the Avengers, where everyone has a clear superpower, rather than people who check ten boxes. Small teams get autonomy to keep startup speed.

Karim Atiyeh's path from Beirut to Ramp

1. Born in Beirut at the end of the civil war in 1989 or 1990, he read science magazines in libraries and noticed the discoveries were made by researchers at MIT.
2. At 16 he attended the Research Science Institute at MIT in 2006 with 60 to 70 students and worked at the startup Virage near the Kendall T stop. When war broke out in Lebanon and the airport closed, his friend Zach invited him to stay with his family in New York.
3. He founded Paribus with Eric Glyman from VBA macros in Excel in 2014, growing to nearly a million users within about a year and scraping billions of emails a day.
4. Paribus survived cease and desist letters and an Amazon security complaint that led to a call with Andy Jassy's AWS team, then sold to Capital One, where the product became Capital One Shopping.