Compare / Ramp vs Pinterest
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Ramp
BUSINESS MODEL
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.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
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.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
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.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
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.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
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.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Ramp
Founders Fund, D1 Capital, Stripe, Goldman Sachs, Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.