Ramp, a finance automation platform, says it has acquired the Sequoia-backed procurement startup Venue, as well as improvements to its Procurement product automation.
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.”
TK Kong, CEO and Co-founder, Venue, said:
“With Venue, we built a frictionless purchasing experience for employees and empowered businesses to buy what they needed while staying in-policy. We’re excited to bring our expertise to Ramp and together help enable more efficiency, productivity, and seamless decision-making for our customers.”
Josephine Chen, Partner, Sequoia Capital, said:
“The Venue team’s engineering velocity and wonderful product design created a delightful procurement experience for customers. 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.”
