Spend management is the hottest FinTech vertical now as Ramp grows revs 10X & doubles valuation 🚀; A FinTech that quadrupled its valuation in 6 months 🤯; Sports stars are the new VCs in crypto? 🤔

Good Morning FinTech, March 23

Good day Everyone,

And happy Wednesday! There’s a lot to talk about today, so without further ado let’s jump straight into business. To be honest, these 3 FinTech stories are the best ones this week. Check them out yourself:

Ramp growing revenues 10X & doubling valuation shows that spend management is one of the hottest FinTech verticals right now 🚀

The money 💸 New York-based Ramp, a corporate card and expense automation platform, just raised a whopping $750M in debt and equity in new financing that sets a valuation of $8.1 billion. That’s more than double from its previous funding last August when Ramp was priced at a $3.9 billion valuation. Wow! 😮

Founders Fund led the latest equity financing with all major existing backers — such as Stripe, D1 Capital Partners, Iconiq Capital, Thrive Capital, Redpoint Ventures, among others — also participating which brings Ramp’s total raised to $1.37B. Not too shabby! 😎

The USP 🥊 Founded in 2019, Ramp came out of stealth in February 2020 with a corporate card offering. At first, it focused on small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), while it now works with virtually anyone — from startups to multibillion-dollar enterprises. The key goal of Ramp now is to help companies generally automate their finances, and that’s probably their biggest competitive advantage.

The numbers 📊 Doubling valuation is less than a year is nice, but fundamentals are much more crucial. Ramp seems to have pretty solid numbers. Here’s what we know:

• The company didn’t reveal any hard revenue figures, he noted that Ramp saw “close to a 10x” bump in revenue year-over-year in 2021.

• More than 5,000 businesses use Ramp, powering over $5B in annualized payments volume.

• Its customer base is up 7x and cardholder growth is up 15x year-over-year.

• It took them over 3 years to reach 10,000 cumulative cardholders, and now they are adding that many in a month.

It’s clear that Ramp is growing like on steroids, but what does this tell us about their vertical as well as the broader FinTech ecosystem? Here’s the takeaway: