Eric Glyman

Eric Glyman's first company made its money catching price drops after customers had already paid, until the retailers behind those refunds withdrew the policies it depended on and about 75 percent of its revenue went with them. He sold what was left to Capital One, spent three years inside the card business learning why its economics run against the customer, and started over.¹

Glyman is the co-founder and CEO of Ramp, a company that provides corporate credit cards and expense-management software designed to help businesses spend less rather than more. He started Ramp in 2019 with Karim Atiyeh, and it has grown into one of the fastest-scaling financial technology companies in the United States. Before Ramp, the two built and sold a smaller company called Paribus, an experience that shaped how Ramp was conceived and run.

Background

Glyman grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, as the city's population roughly quadrupled from around 500,000 to 2 million, leaving him with a lasting question about how things get big that quickly. He was the middle of three brothers; one had a learning disability that went unaddressed by teachers, an early source of frustration with systems that fail people. He graduated valedictorian of Green Valley High School in Las Vegas in 2008, having worked a retail job folding shirts at Express, where he noticed prices fluctuating in ways that seemed unfair to full-price shoppers.

He attended Harvard University, graduating in 2012 with a degree in economics and East Asian studies. Studying Mandarin took him to Beijing for roughly two years as a visiting scholar at Peking University, an experience he has described as watching a city rebuild itself in real time, reinforcing his sense that rapid growth is usually just infrastructure arriving faster than expected. He is fluent in Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish. Afterward he spent about two years as a restructuring analyst at Millstein & Co., reading corporate debt agreements closely enough to find the fine print that mattered.

Getting started

While still finding fine print for a living, Glyman found some in his own life: an airline ticket he had bought dropped in price shortly afterward, and buried in the terms was a clause entitling him to a refund. He and Harvard classmate Karim Atiyeh turned that observation into Paribus, founded in 2013, which scanned users' email receipts and automatically filed refund claims when a purchase's price later dropped. Paribus raised a $2.1 million seed round from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, and Greylock, grew to roughly 700,000 users, and was acquired by Capital One in 2016; Glyman gave most of his retention payout to his team.

Running a shopping and rewards unit inside Capital One's card business for the three years that followed is where Glyman says he learned the economics of the credit card industry: issuers profit from interchange fees paid by merchants, and the rewards points offered to customers are quietly devalued over time, even as customers are encouraged to spend more to chase them.¹ He and Atiyeh founded Ramp in March 2019, with Gene Lee, an engineer from the Paribus days, on the inverse premise: a corporate card built to help companies spend less, not more.

What he built

Ramp launched publicly in February 2020, marketed as a card that helps customers cut costs rather than accumulate rewards. Glyman and Atiyeh had privately set a goal, before founding the company, of reaching a $1 billion valuation within 18 months, a target an advisor told them was better pursued without knowing that no New York-based startup had ever hit a billion dollars that fast. Ramp reached an $8.1 billion valuation by the end of 2021, less than two years after incorporation, with revenue growing roughly 70-fold year over year in 2020.¹

The company expanded well beyond the card, adding bill pay, procurement, travel booking, and treasury and cash-management products. By around its sixth year Ramp had surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue, with non-card lines approaching half of contribution profit, up from card at more than 90 percent in its early years; it now says it processes more than 2 percent of all US corporate and small-business card spending. Valuations climbed from $13 billion in March 2025 to $32 billion by November 2025, with talks of more than $40 billion by mid-2026 alongside a roughly $750 million raise. Ramp also built an internal AI effort, including an automated expense-policy reviewer that Glyman says processes over 100,000 expenses a day at better than 99 percent accuracy; he frames intelligence, alongside capital and labor, as a third governable input to how a business spends money.

How he operates

Glyman describes Paribus and Ramp as the same idea applied twice: a financial product structured against the customer's interest, rebuilt to work for the customer instead. He hires for narrow, extreme strengths over well-rounded competence, using the metaphor of a Formula 1 racer, unusual-looking and prone to breaking down, but built to spec and fast, accepting the weaknesses rather than screening for a flawless generalist.² He builds Ramp's leadership largely by promoting employees internally, citing a roughly 50 percent success rate and heavy cost for senior external hires, describing the practice as cultivating "super ICs," individual contributors trusted to stretch into leadership.² He tracks progress by counting the number of days since founding, treating the count as a pacing device that gives the team permission to say no to lower-priority work.² The pattern throughout is the same: a company built around a personally learned instance of structural unfairness, with hiring and pace engineered around that one insight.

Where things stand

As of mid-2026, Glyman remains co-founder and CEO of Ramp, which has grown to well over a thousand employees serving tens of thousands of business customers. The company has continued raising capital at escalating valuations, pushing further into AI-driven finance products alongside its original card business. Glyman has said he hopes Ramp will be the last company he ever builds, describing his ambition in terms of compounding steadily over decades rather than growing explosively for a short period.¹

Key facts

• Grew up in Las Vegas; graduated valedictorian of Green Valley High School in 2008 and Harvard in 2012 with a degree in economics and East Asian studies.
• Co-founded Paribus in 2013 with Karim Atiyeh; it automated price-drop refund claims, grew to about 700,000 users, and was acquired by Capital One in 2016.
• Co-founded Ramp in March 2019 with Atiyeh and Gene Lee; the company launched publicly in February 2020.
• Ramp reached an $8.1 billion valuation within two years of incorporation, later climbing to $32 billion by November 2025 and talks of more than $40 billion in mid-2026.
• Surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue by around its sixth year and says it processes more than 2 percent of all US corporate and small-business card spending.
• Builds leadership through internal promotion over external executive hiring, and paces the company by counting days since founding.