Karim Atiyeh

Before Ramp existed, Atiyeh and Eric Glyman set an explicit target for it: a billion-dollar company within eighteen months.¹ It was the second business the two had built together, after Paribus, which began life as VBA macros in an Excel spreadsheet and sold to Capital One.

Atiyeh is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ramp, a company that provides corporate credit cards and spend-management software to businesses. He served as Ramp's chief technology officer from its founding in 2019 until mid-2026, when he moved into the co-CEO role alongside Glyman, his co-founder at both companies.

Background

Atiyeh was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, around 1989 or 1990, near the end of the country's civil war, in a childhood he has described as shaped by a felt sense that daily life was fragile. He attended Collège Notre-Dame de Jamhour in Beirut, completing a French Baccalaureate in mathematics in 2007.

As a teenager he taught himself programming from science magazines and noticed many of the discoveries traced back to MIT. He contacted an MIT Research Science Institute (RSI) alumnus and was admitted himself in 2006 at around age 16, his first extended stay in the United States. That summer, war broke out in Lebanon and the airport closed; a friend from RSI, Zach, arranged for Atiyeh to stay with his own family in New York rather than return home, a household Atiyeh has since called a second family.² He went on to Harvard, earning a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering and a master's degree in computer science as a Siebel Scholar around 2011, and worked at Virage, a startup that converted television news broadcasts into searchable text using Markov chains, later calling it an ancestor of today's language models.

Getting started

Atiyeh met Eric Glyman in the early 2010s and the two decided to build a company together. Their first venture, Paribus, started in Williamsburg, Brooklyn around 2013 to 2014 and went through Y Combinator's summer 2015 batch. The idea flipped an asymmetry that favored retailers: prices change constantly, and almost no shopper checks whether something they bought has since dropped. Paribus scanned users' email receipts, detected covered price drops, filed the refund claim automatically, and took a 25 percent commission on money recovered. Atiyeh has said the choice of language mattered less than proving prices moved fast enough to build a business on.²

Paribus launched publicly at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in May 2015 after raising roughly $2.1 million in seed funding, and grew to between 700,000 and one million users within a year, at its peak running one of the largest email-scraping operations in the country against constantly changing retailer websites. Capital One approached the founders in 2016 hoping to partner, and the conversation became a mid-eight-figure acquisition. Atiyeh and Glyman then spent roughly three years inside Capital One's shopping unit, learning the credit card business from the issuer's side.²

What he built

In March 2019, Atiyeh, Glyman, and Gene Lee, an engineer from Paribus, incorporated Ramp, a corporate card built on the same insight as Paribus: an entire industry profited from customers' inattention. Card issuers earn more the more a business spends and profit when reward points go unredeemed; Ramp instead built its business around helping companies spend less, pairing the card with software that flags duplicate subscriptions, blocks unnecessary purchases, and automates expense reporting and bill payment. Ramp launched publicly in February 2020 and hit an $8.1 billion valuation by the end of 2021, under two years from incorporation, with revenue growing sharply in 2020 alone.¹

Ramp kept expanding beyond the card into bill pay, procurement, accounting automation, and treasury management, each line built around one metric: money and time saved for the customer. By June 2026 it had raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation, generated more than $1 billion in annualized revenue, served more than 70,000 businesses, and reportedly accounted for a notable share of corporate and small-business card transactions in the United States.²

How he operates

As CTO, Atiyeh set the engineering culture that let Ramp keep moving at startup speed past its earliest years, largely by splitting the product into two speeds: money-movement and risk systems built to essentially never break, and everything else, allowed to break often and get fixed just as fast, which he has said builds more customer trust than an interface that never shows a seam.² He carried the same instinct into hiring, favoring narrow, unusually steep spikes of talent over broad resumes and requiring that he, Glyman, and one other executive sign off on every hire.³ He also took direct ownership of marketing for a period, treating a slow two-week brief cycle as a system to re-engineer rather than a set of ads to improve one at a time, compressing it to about ten minutes. The same logic drove Ramp's choice of yellow as its brand color: with every competing finance app using blue or green, Atiyeh has said the point was simply that it was different.²

Where things stand

Atiyeh was promoted to co-CEO of Ramp on July 1, 2026, sharing the title with Glyman, with Ramp framing the move as recognition that technology decisions now sit at the center of the business. Rahul Sengottuvelu, previously Ramp's head of applied artificial intelligence and formerly CTO of Cohere before Ramp acquired that company in 2023, succeeded Atiyeh as CTO. Atiyeh and Glyman have worked together for roughly twelve years and describe their partnership as running on mutual trust. Atiyeh has three children and has said he hopes Ramp is the last company either founder ever needs to build.²

Key facts

• Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, around 1989 to 1990, near the end of the country's civil war.
• Attended MIT's Research Science Institute in 2006 at about age 16, then earned a BA in electrical and computer engineering and an MS in computer science from Harvard University.
• Co-founded Paribus with Eric Glyman around 2013 to 2014; the automated price-drop refund company sold to Capital One in 2016 for a mid-eight-figure deal.
• Co-founded Ramp with Glyman and Gene Lee in March 2019 after setting an explicit goal of reaching a billion-dollar valuation within eighteen months; Ramp hit $8.1 billion by the end of 2021.
• Served as Ramp's CTO from founding through mid-2026, when the company reached a $44 billion valuation and he was promoted to co-CEO alongside Glyman.
• Drove Ramp's choice of yellow as its brand color specifically because every competing finance app used blue or green.