Ramp Radically Expands Procurement Capabilities with Venue Acquisition and Product Enhancements

News provided by

Jan 30, 2024, 10:00 ET

Acquisition accelerates Ramp's ability to help businesses be more productive and effective through time and money-saving software.
New product capabilities centralize how employee purchases are requested, approved, and paid for – giving businesses the context they need to stay in control of how capital is allocated and make more informed decisions.
Reveals Ramp processes over $10 billion in annualized accounts payable volume, as businesses increasingly choose Ramp to power all finance operations.

NEW YORK, Jan. 30, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Ramp, the finance automation platform designed to save businesses time and money, today announced the acquisition of Sequoia-backed procurement startup Venue, as well as improvements to its Procurement product automations. The announcement represents a significant expansion for Ramp beyond corporate cards as the company tackles inefficiencies across the entire financial tech stack.

Founded in 2022 by co-founders TK Kong, Young Kim, and Kevin Chan, Venue focused on simplifying how businesses review, approve, and manage the cost of vendors in use across their company. After observing that most employees don't understand their company's procurement process or how to comply with it, the team built an intuitive solution that empowers employees to request what they need, while simultaneously providing finance teams with visibility into all requests and corresponding spend. Within a year, the company supported customers averaging 500-1,000 full-time-employees, and raised $1.2 million in financing from firms including Sequoia Capital, Exponent Founders Capital, and Basecase Capital.

At Ramp, the Venue team will lead efforts to automate and streamline procurement workflows and vendor management so businesses can control spend before it happens– with initial projects such as customized intake forms, flexible approvals, purchase order management, and AI-powered vendor management.

"With Venue, we built a frictionless purchasing experience for employees and empowered businesses to buy what they needed while staying in-policy," said TK Kong, CEO and Co-founder, Venue. "We're excited to bring our expertise to Ramp and together help enable more efficiency, productivity, and seamless decision-making for our customers."

"The Venue team's engineering velocity and wonderful product design created a delightful procurement experience for customers," said Josephine Chen, Partner, Sequoia Capital. "Now, with the acquisition into Ramp, Venue will be able to expand its exceptional products to a broader customer ecosystem, reinventing the procurement process for companies across industries."

In conjunction with the acquisition, Ramp is also launching major improvements to its Procurement product that enable more control over and insight into employee spend, accelerate review cycles, and uncover opportunities to save on IT and software spend. These features are available today for businesses on Ramp Plus, and include:

A bi-directional integration with providers including Ironclad to seamlessly integrate a contract review process into Ramp's approval workflow.
Dynamic intake forms to capture every purchase request in one place and create an easy, guided purchasing experience for employees.
Purchase order enhancements to reduce manual work and data entry. Purchase Orders can now sync to accounting platforms including NetSuite and QuickBooks, as well as auto-code matched invoices.
Collaboration tools that let stakeholders easily comment and tag team members within requests, centralizing procurement conversations in Ramp and eliminating long, confusing email threads.
An activity feed to audit-proof procurement processes and keep record of approvals and changes made to requests and purchase orders throughout procurement cycles.
Seat Intelligence to track actual software usage against seats purchased and ensure businesses are getting their money's worth from their SaaS contracts.

News of the acquisition and expanded product capabilities come amid sustained momentum in Ramp's accounts payable product, which processes over $10 billion in annualized accounts payable volume. This growth, in just over two years since launch, shows that businesses are increasingly choosing to process more of their spend on Ramp's platform rather than juggle dozens of different tools that are each disconnected from each other and the real-time flow of money. By unifying procurement with card issuance and accounts payable, Ramp eliminates the need for yet another solution and transforms a typically manual and painful process into a highly efficient and organized one.

"Before Ramp Procurement, we did everything on paper and requests could take up to a month," said Michelle LaBonney, Director of Finance & Operations, Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth. "With Ramp, the end to end process is complete in a matter of days, meaning we can get much needed supplies and focus on delivering care to our clients (teenagers in crisis) faster."

"Running a modern business can be much simpler – that's why everything we do is focused on helping our customers spend less time and money," said Eric Glyman, CEO, Ramp. "The products launched today will save employees from time-consuming, manual tasks and allow companies to operate much more nimbly. We're thrilled to welcome the Venue team to Ramp and are grateful for their leadership in eliminating inefficient procurement cycles."

About Ramp
Ramp is the ultimate platform for modern finance teams. From spend management and expense management software, to bill payments and vendor management, Ramp's all-in-one solution is designed to automate finance operations and build healthier businesses. Over 15,000 businesses have switched to Ramp to cut their expenses by an average of 5% and close their books 8x faster. Learn more at ramp.com.

Media contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Ramp