Hello fintech friends,

We're back with our fourth installment of Building The Best, our podcast hosted by the fantastic Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures.

In this podcast, we dive deep into the fundamentals of creating and scaling transformative fintech products by interviewing the founders themselves.

In this episode, Jillian is joined by Karim Atiyeh, the Co-Founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is a U.S.-based fintech that offers corporate cards, expense management, and bill payment software. As of late 2023, the company was projected to process over $13 billion in payments annually.

Karim was previously the Founder and CTO of Paribus, an automatic refund platform for shoppers sold to Capital One, and prior to that, a consultant at Oliver Wyman.

You can give the episode a listen here:

Building The Best Ramp

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as well as here on Spotify.

"If I were to go back to one moment that was crucial for many of us over the past couple of years it was COVID, which hit everyone at the same time. It was a double whammy for us, in a way, where it was hitting us as a company [and] all of our customers were affected as well. If they're unable to operate, they default on their payments. As a result, it meant that we would manually go to every single one of our customers, reach out to them, talk to them, and build our a lot of our risk processes from scratch around that time. So we were able to – from the ground up – build the right underwriting processes, fraud processes, etc.

But it was scary. We didn't know perfectly what we were doing. But, I don't think anyone did; we would reach out to friends at the risk departments of larger companies with more experience at consulting firms like "what's your COVID framework," and everyone was kind of figuring out what they should do on the go. So it was both very stressful. And also a lot of fun."
- Karim Atiyeh

Jillian Williams  00:00

All righty. And today we have Karim, one of the cofounders of Ramp. Thank you so much for joining us. If you want to give a quick introduction on yourself, we're really excited to have you with us today.

Karim Atiyeh  00:13

Thanks for having me join! So yeah, as you just mentioned, I'm the co-founder of Ramp. But before that, I had started another company called Paribus, with one of the same co-founders, Eric Glyman. And prior to that I was actually a software engineer who had – almost by accident – gotten into management consulting post the 2008 financial crisis. So a lot of my early work in consulting actually was helping banks understand risks, better manage their capital, and a lot of that early experience, I guess, came back to being useful when we started Ramp in 2019.

We've grown it to about 500 people now and serve upwards of 50,000 companies. So for those of you who don't know, we’re a corporate finance automation platform, providing everything from a corporate card to reimbursements to building payments for growing companies and finance teams who are looking to modernize their operations.