Ramp Raises $500 Million to Fund Financial Automation AI Agent

Expense management startup Ramp is reportedly now a $22.5 billion company.

The company, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) for financial automation, achieved that valuation after raising $500 million in its latest funding round, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Wednesday (July 30).

The funds will help Ramp hire engineers, product experts and marketing and sales staff who focus on building and selling Ramp’s AI agents, Co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman told the WSJ. Those agents help corporate finance teams automate things like expense report compliance, with future versions set to assist with procurement and bookkeeping, Glyman said.

“Functionally, we’re teaching software to think like people,” he said, adding that the future of corporate finance will feature significantly more automation.

The WSJ report notes that the funding round is happening in tandem with the rapid growth of AI agents, autonomous bots that can carry out tasks on behalf of humans. Ramp deployed its first AI agent earlier this month, and says thousands of customers have since signed on to try it.

Among them is Richard Gobea, a finance manager at Quora, who said the question-and-answer website uses the agent to automate the work of an entry-level accountant or clerk who normally checks worker expenses against a corporate policy document.

“I’m spending my time digging in a little more on the expenses the AI agent is flagging,” he said.

Despite the potential benefits of using AI agents, the risks are even starker, PYMNTS wrote recently. A growing number of voices are calling for restraint in agents’ deployment, including Trustly Chief Legal and Compliance Officer Kathryn McCall.

“You’re messing with people’s money here,” she said in a recent for the June edition of the “What’s Next in Payments” series, “What’s Next in Payments: Secret Agent.”

“This is a lot different from using an AI agent to plan your vacation in Paris,” McCall added.

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence finds trust issues are holding back businesses from using agentic AI, with 80% of high-automation enterprises citing data security and privacy as their chief concern with the technology.

“Unlike traditional automation tools, agentic systems may involve dynamic decision-making across multiple systems, requiring permissions and credentials that can span departments or functions,” PYMNTS wrote. “Misconfigurations, insufficient access controls, or opaque decision paths can elevate the likelihood of a data breach or policy violation.”

Ramp’s Series E-2 funding round was led by Iconiq Growth, which is also reportedly leading Anthropic’s latest fundraising effort which would value that AI startup at $170 billion.

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

The post Ramp Raises $500 Million to Fund Financial Automation AI Agent appeared first on PYMNTS.com.