Ramp CEO invites co-founder Karim Atiyeh to share top job

• Key insight: The promotion gives Atiyeh, who has led Ramp's technology function since its founding, equal standing with Glyman at the top of a company that has tripled its valuation in the past year.
• Expert quote: "Every part of the company must be positioned to leverage the continued explosion in model intelligence and capabilities." — Eric Glyman, Ramp CEO
• Forward look: The leadership changes come as Ramp works to expand beyond its core corporate card business into AI spending infrastructure and the accounting firm market, following a $750 million Series F raise earlier this month.

Corporate spend management fintech Ramp announced a C-suite shakeup on Thursday. 

The rapidly growing company — now valued at $44 billion — promoted Chief Technology Officer Karim Atiyeh to serve as co-CEO alongside Eric Glyman. The two co-founded Ramp with Gene Lee in 2019 and have worked closely for more than a decade. 

"From when we first started building together twelve years ago, our partnership has run on a couple of motivating principles," Glyman wrote on X. "On decision-making, we trust each other completely to make critical calls for the company across every function."

Glyman and Atiyeh met as undergraduates at Harvard University. In 2014, they co-founded Paribus, a price-tracking app that automatically secured retroactive refunds for consumers, which was acquired by Capital One two years later. 

Glyman attributed the decision's timing to the "AI exponential reshaping what Ramp can be." The fintech's strategic decisions are "increasingly decisions of technology and systems design," the Ramp founder added. 

"Every part of the company must be positioned to leverage the continued explosion in model intelligence and capabilities," Glyman continued. "If we fail to operate this way we will ultimately be outcompeted by a new company that does."

Atiyeh's role will be filled by Rahul Sengottuvelu, who previously served as the company's head of applied AI. Sengottuvelu joined the fintech in 2023, after Ramp acquired the startup he co-founded, Cohere. 

"Rahul's superpower is being right early. He spots the bet worth making while everyone else is still forming an opinion," Atiyeh wrote in a social media post. 

The company also announced Hamid Dadkhah as its new head of engineering. Dadkhah joined Ramp in March 2023 and quickly climbed the fintech's software engineering ranks. 

"We are still very early in the history of Ramp. Our current chapter is perhaps the most dynamic, but we have never been more optimistic on where it is going and the mission has never been more important," Glyman and Atiyeh concluded. 

Earlier this month, Ramp raised $750 million in a Series F funding round, valuing the New York-based platform 38% higher than its valuation seven months prior, and marking a 175% increase from this time last year. The latest fundraise brings the company's total equity financing to over $3 billion.

Ramp has increasingly positioned itself around AI spending infrastructure, including a Token Spend Management product launched in April that helps businesses track and control their AI costs. The company also broke into the $150 billion accounting firm market with its June 3 launch of Stack, an AI operating system aimed at helping firms handle client onboarding and bookkeeping cleanup.

The company reported $1 billion in annualized revenue as of June 1, with over 70,000 enterprise customers and $200 billion in annualized purchase volume.