Ramp

Magic AI

Ramp

Ramp makes money from interchange fees — the 1.5-2.5% that merchants pay on every credit card transaction. Unlike consumer cards that share interchange with users through rewards, Ramp gives a flat 1.5% cashback and keeps the rest.

The real business model is becoming the financial operating system for companies: once a company uses Ramp's card, they also use Ramp for expense management, bill pay, accounting automation, and procurement — all of which increase switching costs and customer lifetime value.

Magic AI

Magic is building an AI that works like a software engineer, not a chatbot. The goal is a model you can hand a whole code base and a task, and it writes, reviews, and debugs like a teammate.

Their edge is memory. In 2024 they showed off LTM-2-mini, a model with a 100 million token context window.

To put that in perspective, that is about 10 million lines of code the model can look at in one shot, by far the biggest of any model at the time. The plan is to sell this as an AI coworker to companies that write a lot of software.

As of the 2024 rounds, the product was still not for sale.

Ramp

Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh had previously co-founded Paribus, a tool that automatically got refunds when prices dropped on things you'd already bought. Capital One acquired Paribus in 2016.

The experience taught them something: businesses were terrible at managing their spending, and the tools they used — corporate credit cards from Amex and Chase — were designed to encourage spending, not control it.

In 2019, they launched Ramp with a contrarian premise. Every other corporate card company made money by getting businesses to spend more (higher spend = more interchange revenue).

Ramp would make money from interchange too, but would actively help businesses spend less through automated expense management, duplicate subscription detection, and price negotiation.

The pitch to CFOs was irresistible: get a corporate card with 1.5% cashback, and we'll also find you an average of 5% savings on your total spending through our software. The card was the wedge.

The expense management platform was the real product.

Magic AI

Eric Steinberger and Sebastian De Ro started Magic in 2022. Steinberger is an AI researcher who became convinced that the missing piece for a true AI software engineer was memory.

Chatbots forget what you told them a few thousand words ago. He wanted a model that could read your entire code base and remember all of it.

They raised a small seed in 2022, then a $23 million Series A in early 2023 led by Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG. From day one the pitch was not a chatbot.

It was an AI colleague that could handle real engineering work.

Ramp

Ramp grew by selling savings, not credit. The pitch to finance teams was: "We'll save you more money than we cost you." In an era when every company was looking to cut costs, Ramp offered a corporate card that came with a free expense management platform that actively found savings.

CFOs couldn't say no.

The product-led approach bypassed traditional enterprise sales cycles. A finance manager could sign up for Ramp, issue cards, and start seeing savings within a week — no six-month procurement process, no IT integration project.

The free expense management tools were so good that companies switched from Concur, Expensify, and Brex just for the software, with the card as a bonus.

Speed of execution was the differentiator. Ramp shipped features faster than any competitor.

They went from a corporate card to a full financial operations platform in three years. Every quarter, Ramp launched features that competitors took a year to build.

By 2024, over 25,000 businesses were using Ramp and the company was processing tens of billions in annualized spend.

Magic AI

Magic's strategy is research first, product later, which is both unusual and expensive. Instead of shipping an app and iterating in public, they raised huge sums to chase a technical breakthrough in model memory.

The headline move was the 100 million token context claim, which got the whole AI world talking. They also cut a deal with Google Cloud in 2024 to build two supercomputers, called Magic-G4 and Magic-G5, using NVIDIA chips, to train bigger models.

Star backers like Eric Schmidt served as validation. The bet is that if the tech is far enough ahead, the product and the customers follow.

Ramp

Brex is the obvious competitor. Brex launched two years before Ramp with a similar corporate card concept and had the first-mover advantage.

But Brex pivoted away from small businesses to focus on enterprise in 2022 — angering thousands of existing customers — while Ramp doubled down on serving companies of all sizes. The competition has become a case study in strategic focus versus strategic pivots.

The "spend less" positioning has a mathematical ceiling. If Ramp's AI genuinely helps companies spend less, the interchange revenue from those companies also decreases.

There's an inherent tension between the mission (reduce spending) and the revenue model (earn a percentage of spending). Ramp has managed this by growing the customer base faster than individual customer spending declines.

Enterprise sales is the next frontier and it's expensive. Moving upmarket from startups and mid-market companies to Fortune 500 enterprises requires a sales team, implementation support, and enterprise features that cost real money to build and sell.

Ramp has been investing heavily in enterprise capabilities, but competing with Amex and JP Morgan for large corporate accounts is a different game than winning startups.

Magic AI

Magic has raised close to half a billion dollars and, years in, still has no product the public can buy. That is the whole problem in one sentence.

A giant context window is a great demo, but rivals like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Cognition's Devin already have real users and revenue. Magic has to prove that more memory actually makes a smarter engineer, not just a bigger number on a slide.

And it has to do that while burning enormous sums on compute against competitors who are already shipping. The clock and the cash both keep running.

Ramp

Ramp Corporate Card is the core — unlimited physical and virtual cards with 1.5% cashback and built-in spend controls. Ramp Expense Management automates receipt matching, policy enforcement, and reimbursements.

Ramp Bill Pay handles vendor payments and AP automation. Ramp Procurement manages vendor contracts and purchase approvals.

Ramp Intelligence uses AI to identify duplicate subscriptions, negotiate better rates, and flag wasteful spending. Ramp Flex offers flexible payment terms for businesses that need to extend their payables cycle.

Ramp Accounting automates close processes and syncs with QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, and Sage.

Magic AI

The centerpiece is Magic's LTM, or Long-Term Memory, model family. In 2024 they unveiled LTM-2-mini, a model with a 100 million token context window, pitched as the key to an AI that can understand an entire code base at once.

The broader product is an AI software engineer, or coworker, that can write and change code across a whole project. The company also announced Magic-G4 and Magic-G5, two supercomputers built with Google Cloud and NVIDIA to train these models.

Much of it is still research rather than a shipping product.

Ramp

Founders Fund, D1 Capital, Stripe, Goldman Sachs, Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures

Magic AI

Magic's backers are a murderers' row of AI insiders. It started with a $5 million seed round in 2022 and a $23 million Series A in early 2023 led by Alphabet's CapitalG.

Then in February 2024 came a $117 million round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, two of the most connected investors in AI. The blowout was August 2024.

Magic raised $320 million with checks from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, CapitalG again, Atlassian, Jane Street, Sequoia, and Elad Gil. That pushed total funding to around $465 million, all for a company still building toward its first sellable product.