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Skill 29 · Knowledge Base For Startups
Subchapter 29.222
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Every company exists to deliver on its mission, whether it’s a public sector organization delivering vital services, a corporation creating value for customers and shareholders, or a startup pushing the boundaries of innovation. But achieving that mission can often come down to how efficiently the business is operating behind the scenes.
Ramp (opens in a new tab), a financial operations platform, is dedicated to eliminating operational obstacles to growth. The company has developed an all-in-one spend management solution that empowers businesses to achieve more while spending less. “Anything from expenses to bill payments to accounting and procurement: we consolidate everything into one delightful system,” says Geoff Charles, Chief Product Officer at Ramp.
To help companies save time and money, Ramp’s platform is evolving at speed to better serve its customers. “One of our biggest cultural aspects at Ramp is our velocity,” says Charles. This is evident in the startup’s impressive growth. It raised three rounds of funding this year alone, increasing valuation from US$13 billion in March to US$22.5 billion in July. In just five years its customer base has grown to over 45,000, its offering has expanded to six product lines, and it powers over US$100 billion in annualized purchase volume across card transactions and bill payments. A significant part of achieving this, says Charles, “is having an infrastructure that enables us to deploy quickly, to test quickly, and to scale quickly. And that’s AWS.”
Ramp has been collaborating with AWS “since the very beginning,” says Charles. And with velocity a part of the company’s DNA, “having a technology partner that moves just as fast as we do is paramount.” Ramp uses core AWS infrastructure with robust security built in, which is critical when operating in the highly regulated finance environment. The company also leverages AWS Fargate (opens in a new tab) to scale services up and down and keep data safe, and AWS GovCloud (opens in a new tab) to meet the security needs of public sector organizations.
Charles asserts that “the future of finance is AI.” Yet many finance teams still rely on spreadsheets—or even more antiquated methods. “A lot of companies are still operating with paper,” he explains. They “pay each other with checks and a lot of workers are still filing expenses manually.” Consider the average expense report, “this is a low value task, but it takes a lot of time for employees, their managers, and finance teams,” explains Charles. Utilizing spreadsheets and legacy systems in which “everything is disjointed” also risks inaccuracies and fraud.
When looking at integrating AI into its platform, Ramp had to overcome a major hurdle: “How do we make sure there is the right level of scalability, performance, and reliability?” Ramp’s platform automates myriad finance operations. “We have a card business that needs to make millisecond decisions on card authorizations. We move money via many different rails, in many different geographies,” says Charles. Despite diverse customer needs—from reliability and security to global access and privacy—one constant remains: the requirement for robust infrastructure that scales on demand without sacrificing performance.
In this dynamic landscape, Ramp is “excited about the future of work” and the potential of AI and automation to empower it. “It’s going to help us travel faster. It’s going to help us connect. It’s going to help us accelerate commerce between businesses and money movement globally,” says Charles. With velocity as a core tenet of its culture, Ramp is committed to delivering these benefits at an accelerated—and competitive—pace.
For Ramp, security and data privacy are crucial. Many of its customers have ambitions to scale globally and enabling this “requires us to have localization and expertise in different geographies in terms of their data privacy and data security needs,” says Charles. As a startup, Ramp has a small security team tasked with managing and scaling core infrastructure, as well as making sure customer data and services are secure.
AWS has played a pivotal role in strengthening Ramp’s security team, allowing them to achieve more—and do so securely—with limited resources. “With AWS, we’ve been able to focus a lot more on where we drive value and differentiation,” says Charles.
Ramp leverages AWS GovCloud, a solution that allows users to host sensitive and controlled unclassified information data. It offers automated compliance processes and comprehensive security measures, as well as generative AI capabilities to increase productivity and mission outcomes. Leveraging AWS GovCloud means Ramp can “meet the needs of the public sector in terms of data privacy, localization, and security,” says Charles. This is an area where Ramp has identified significant potential and working with AWS “has enabled us to move very fast in the public space.”
Ramp doesn’t just rely on AWS infrastructure—it also depends on the human expertise of AWS. The team has been “leveraging AWS experts to help us solve problems and set up, maintain, and monitor as we continue our amazing growth.”
For example, many of Ramp’s customers are using its platform to increase their global footprint, which requires them to adhere to different regional data privacy and security frameworks. Ramp relies on the security credentials of AWS infrastructure and the knowledge of its team, allowing it more time to focus on value-add tasks and continue to deliver at an impressive speed.
In addition to compliance, AWS experts continuously advise Ramp on how to evolve its architecture in line with best practices, and to optimize its use of AWS services. The collaboration “has helped us to scale rapidly to keep our financial data accurate and safe, and to harden our infrastructure as we continue to scale to thousands and thousands of businesses, and millions of dollars moved on a daily basis,” says Charles. AWS Fargate in particular empowers Ramp to dynamically scale, spinning up compute resources as needed and scaling down to control costs.
Working with AWS has helped Ramp to further its mission and innovate at speed. Ramp is rapidly realizing its vision for an AI-powered future for finance teams and beyond: what “that looks like is an assistant for every single person at the company, whether it’s booking a trip, hosting a conference, planning an offsite, doing expenses. It’s ensuring that you’re paying the right bills, buying from the right vendors, that your financial statements are accurate,” says Charles. With velocity as a defining trait, Ramp is building faster, scaling smarter, and helping its customers do the same.