Ramp CEO Eric Glyman Credits Munger Philosophy for Rapid Growth and $13B Valuation 🇺🇸
We're also covering Revolut's Russian ties controversy 🇺🇦, Airwallex buying CTIN Pay 🇻🇳, Swan helping merchants deal with tariffs 🇬🇧, US banks issued stablecoins getting green-lighted 🇺🇸, etc.
🇺🇸 Ramp CEO Eric Glyman Credits Munger Philosophy for Rapid Growth and $13B Valuation
Founded just five years ago, corporate spend management platform Ramp is already valued at $13 billion. CEO Eric Glyman says this achievement is the result of focusing on one simple idea.
"Take a simple idea and take it seriously," Glyman wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, quoting Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger. For Ramp, that straightforward concept was "save every business time and money." Glyman explained in his post that when starting Ramp, they "found an industry designed to do the opposite: corporate cards rewarded more spending and finance teams drowned in manual work."
To achieve its mission, Eric Glyman explains that Ramp leverages artificial intelligence across the board. "It is not possible to use Ramp without using AI," Glyman explained, with technology now "deeply integrated in every part of the business: expenses that do themselves, books that do themselves, money that finds higher yield."
Ramp’s $13 billion valuation is the result of a $150 million secondary share sale to Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC, private equity group Stripes, Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst. It represents a two-fold increase since Ramp was valued at $7.65 billion in April last year. American footballer Saquon Barkley, a top celebrity fintech investor, had also recently backed the company, adding his star-power to Ramp's impressive investor roster that also includes Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital.
Ramp doubled its annual recurring revenue (ARR) to 700 million USD since last year, allowing it to pass competitors such as US-based Brex, set to reach 500 million in revenue in 2025, and Singapore-based Airwallex, which recently reached 600 million in ARR. With almost.twice the employees that Brex has (2,000 compares to 1,100) and a broader target market (since Brex now focuses more on enterprise clients), Ramp might have a higher burn rate, which would explain why CEO Eric Glyman told the Financial Time that, unlike his competitors, he had no immediate plan for an IPO.
Source: Global Fintech Insider
🇻🇳 Airwallex Acquires Vietnamese Payment Provider CTIN Pay
Airwallex, a Singapore-based spend management and payout platform for SMBs, has signed definitive agreements to acquire Vietnamese payment provider CTIN Pay. This deal expands Airwallex’s licensing portfolio that already spans Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. To accelerate its Southeast Asian expansion, the fintech co-founded in 2015 by current CEO Jack Zhang (on the picture above), appointed Ershad Ahamed as Head of Southeast Asia. The fintech executive previously held senior roles at Singapore-based super app Grab, where he built a payment and lending business as Chief Commercial Officer for GrabFin Indonesia. Following the recent purchase of Mexico-based MexPago, this latest acquisition further advances Airwallex's strategy to build a comprehensive global financial infrastructure for cross-border payments.
Source: Fintech News Singapore
🇺🇸 Plaid Reveals Commercial Data Ambitions As Valuation Shrinks To $6B
Bank accounts data aggregator Plaid is planning to expand into commercial data, as revealed by Ethan Geiling, leader of strategic financial institution partnerships, at the Bank Automation Summit 2025. Co-founded by William Hockey and current CEO Zach Perret (in the picture above) in 2012, the fintech is now responding to the growing market demand for business data aggregation. Plaid is simultaneously arranging a secondary share sale led by Franklin Templeton that should value the company at approximately $6 billion, less than half its 2021 valuation of $13.4 billion. Despite this valuation decline, Plaid's business continues to grow, with annual recurring revenue reaching around $400 million last year.
Source: The Information & Bank Automation News
🇧🇷 Nubank Boosts Customer Service With OpenAI Implementation
Latin American digital financial services giant Nubank has partnered with OpenAI to enhance both customer experiences and internal operations. The fintech, which serves over 114 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, has implemented several AI solutions across its business. Accoding to an OpenAI’s blog post, Nubank's AI-powered assistant now handles over 2 million monthly chats, resolves 55% of basic inquiries without human intervention, and has reduced chat response times by 70%. The company has also developed an enterprise knowledge search system, a call center copilot that supports human agents, and is piloting a fraud detection system using GPT-4o vision to analyze transactions and documents. These implementations have helped Nubank resolve customer queries 2.3 times faster while maintaining the same level of customer satisfaction.
Source: Global Fintech Insider
🇺🇦 Revolut CEO Russian Ties Under Scrutiny As Company Enters Ukraine Without License
UK-based fintech Revolut has begun operating in Ukraine without obtaining a local banking license, prompting the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) to issue a warning that the company falls outside Ukraine's consumer protection laws. The NBU confirmed that Revolut has not submitted relevant applications or begun the licensing procedure, though the company claims to have informed regulators of its plans. According to Kyiv Post, Revolut's Russian connections could complicate its regulatory approval, as the process to obtain a banking license involves a background check on on the banks’ founders. Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky, who was born in Russia, has publicly claimed to have renounced his Russian citizenship, but there is no publicly available evidence confirming he completed this process. Kyiv Post also notes that Storonsky's father, Nikolai Storonsky senior (on the picture above), remains under Ukrainian sanctions as CEO of Gazprom Promgaz, a research institute operating under the umbrella of Russian oil giant Gazprom.
Source: Kyiv Post
🇺🇸 US Banks Get Regulatory Green Light To Launch Stablecoins
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has officially rescinded Biden-era restrictions that required banks to obtain supervisory approval before engaging in crypto activities. As a result, the OCC has effectively cleared the path for national banks to issue stablecoins. This regulatory shift comes at a significant time as Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan previously revealed plans to launch a fully dollar-backed Bank of America stablecoin once regulations permitted. This move also aligns with the Trump administration's permissive approach toward crypto regulations.
Source: American Banker
🇮🇳 Insurance Marketplace InsuranceDekho Bags $70M From Japan's Largest Bank
InsuranceDekho, an Indian online insurance marketplace, has secured $70 million in funding co-led by Japan's largest bank Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), BNP Paribas Cardif's insurtech fund, and Beams Fintech Fund. Founded in 2017 as a spinoff from automobile platform CarDekho, the Indian insurtech has built a network of 220,000 insurance agents who sell more than 720 different insurance products through its platform. CEO Ankit Agrawal (on the right of the picture above) revealed the company is in discussions for an additional $15-20 million from a new investor and is targeting an IPO within the next 15-18 months. The funding represents growing international interest in India's expanding insurtech sector, where InsuranceDekho competes with publicly-listed Policybazaar and venture-backed Turtlemint.
Source: The Economic Times
🇺🇸 American Express Buys Center, An Expense Management Platform Launched By Concur Co-Founder
American Express has announced plans to acquire Center, a Seattle-area expense management startup targeting mid-market companies with software for tracking corporate spending and its own corporate credit card. The acquisition positions American Express to better compete with fintech challengers like Ramp and Brex in the corporate expense management space. Founded in 2017, Center has raised more than $140 million from private investors and employs about 160 people, all of whom will join American Express when the deal closes in the second quarter of 2025. Center's chairman is Steve Singh (on the picture above), co-founder of travel expense management giant Concur (which SAP acquired for $8.3 billion in 2014), and its CEO is his son, Naveen Singh. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Source: GeekWire
🇬🇧 Swap Raises $40M To Help Online Merchants Deal With Tariff Headaches
As new tariffs are being announced and repealed almost daily by the US, London-based fintech Swap has secured $40 million in Series B funding to expand its platform that helps e-commerce merchants navigate these increasingly unpredictable cross-border trading challenges. Led by Iconiq Growth with participation from Cherry Ventures, QED Investors, Portfolio Ventures, and 9900 Capital, the investment will fuel Swap's expansion beyond the UK into wider Europe, the US, Australia, and Canada. Co-founded by current CEO Sam Atkinson and Zach Bailet, Swap was designed to address the pain points they experienced running a cross-border e-commerce business together. It provides merchants with a single platform to manage logistics, shipping operations, inventory, returns, and product recycling.
Source: TechCrunch
🇱🇹 Lithuanian myTU Shows How To Run A Bank With 25 People
Digital bank myTU has raised 10 million EUR (10.9 million USD) in a funding round that values the Lithuanian fintech at over 35 million EUR (38 million USD). What sets myTU apart is its remarkable efficiency serving over 50,000 retail customers and 200+ businesses with just 25 employees thanks to its proprietary cloud native architecture. Co-founded in 2019 by CTO Tomas Navickas and CEO Raman Korneu (on the picture above), the Vilnius based fintech had previously raised just 6 million EUR (6.5 million USD) to build its infrastructure, and is now focused on breaking even this year. The new funding will support product expansion, including acquiring and lending services, and regulatory preparations for securing a full banking license from the Bank of Lithuania.
Source: EU Startups
🇨🇦 Canadian Insurer Manulife Reports $417M Return From AI Investments
Canadian insurance giant Manulife has rolled out generative AI tools and learning programs to 100% of its global workforce, though currently 75% of employees are actively engaging with the technology. As part of its multi billion dollar investment in AI and cloud technology, the company has deployed more than 35 GenAI use cases across Canada, the US, and Asia, with plans to introduce an additional 70 by the end of 2025. Manulife has built a dedicated team of nearly 200 data scientists and machine learning engineers to scale its AI capabilities, which include ChatMFC (the company's proprietary AI assistant), an AI enabled translation tool supporting nine languages, and a sales enablement tool that delivers personalized insights to advisors. The insurer reported a 600 million CAD (417 million USD) return from digital initiatives in 2024.
Source: InsurTech Insights
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Hi, my name is Julien Brault.
From 2017 to 2024, I was the CEO of Hardbacon, a fintech I co-founded, which reached 400,000 unique visitors at its peak.
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