Corporate spend management fintech Ramp is tweaking titles within its C-suite.
Co-founder Karim Atiyeh, previously the company’s chief technology officer, is now its co-CEO, alongside co-founder Eric Glyman, the executives announced last week in a blog post.
“If you know us, this won't feel like a change,” Glyman wrote Thursday. “On decision-making, we trust each other completely to make critical calls for the company across every function.”
In a separate LinkedIn post Thursday, Atiyeh wrote: “Eric and I have worked as a team for the past 12 years. This only makes it formal.”
Glyman and Atiyeh co-founded Paribus, an app that secured retroactive refunds for consumers, in 2014. Capital One acquired the app two years later. Glyman and Atiyeh went on to launch Ramp in 2019.
Rahul Sengottuvelu, previously Ramp’s head of applied artificial intelligence, will succeed Atiyeh as CTO, the co-founders said Thursday.
“Rahul's superpower is being right early,” Atiyeh wrote on LinkedIn. “He spots the bet worth making while everyone else is still forming an opinion.”
CTO is not a stretch role for Sengottuvelu. He served as CTO at Cohere, a startup he co-founded. Ramp bought Cohere in 2023.
Sengottuvelu “was building customer-service agents on GPT-3 at a time when almost no one knew what a large language model was, and he has spent every year since pushing the frontier of what existing models can do,” Glyman said. “He has also been right on nearly every major technical direction in AI well before it was obvious.”
Atiyeh also noted that Ramp had tapped Hamid Dadkhah as its head of engineering.
“Speed compounds. What used to take a year takes < 1 month now. Glad to have these two running it,” Atiyeh wrote, referring to Sengottuvelu and Dadkhah.
The tweaks to personnel bookend a month that began with Ramp announcing it had raised $750 million, for a total valuation of $44 billion.
As for the timing of Atiyeh’s elevation from CTO, Glyman wrote: “Technology is not a distinct part of the company - it is the entirety of it.”
“Strategy decisions are increasingly technology and systems-design decisions, and we want the company built around that reality,” Atiyeh wrote in his LinkedIn post.
Glyman added that Ramp made its co-CEO announcement “now because of how we see the AI exponential reshaping what Ramp can be.”
“Every part of the company must be positioned to leverage the continued explosion in model intelligence and capabilities,” Glyman wrote. “If we do this well, each step-change in what models can do compounds automatically into better products and faster execution without anyone having to rebuild the company to capture it.
“If we fail to operate this way we will ultimately be outcompeted by a new company that does,” he wrote.
Ramp, thus far this year, has encroached into AI spending infrastructure. In April, it launched a platform aimed at giving companies more visibility into their AI spend. Then in June, Ramp debuted Stack, an AI operating system meant to help accounting firms onboard clients and optimize bookkeeping.
