Ramp appoints co-founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh as Co-CEOs and promotes Applied AI lead Rahul Sengottuvelu to CTO

Eric and I have worked as a team for the past 12 years. This only makes it formal. Strategy decisions are increasingly technology and systems-design decisions, and we want the company built around that reality.

Stepping in as CTO is @rahulgs. Rahul's superpower is being right early. He spots the bet worth making while everyone else is still forming an opinion. A lot of Ramp's best decisions trace back to that instinct, and now it's pointed at the whole technical org.

@HamidDadkhah3 is taking on a new role as Head of Engineering. Hamid cares about what the customer actually achieved, not what we shipped, and he moves things over the line without waiting to be asked twice. Engineering orgs are supposed to slow down as they grow. Hamid takes that as a personal challenge.

Speed compounds. What used to take a year takes < 1 month now. Glad to have these two running it.

Today @karimatiyeh and I are both taking new titles as Co-CEOs of @tryramp.

If you know us, this won't feel like a change. From when we first started building together twelve years ago, our partnership has run on a couple of motivating principles. On decision-making, we trust each other completely to make critical calls for the company across every function. And on organization design, technology is not a distinct part of the company - it is the entirety of it. That is why Karim has for years directly managed risk, operations, and marketing.

Most importantly, at Ramp there is no line between the people who build and the people who do everything else. Everyone is a builder.

For the last 2,656 days, we have run the company this way. This only makes it formal. We thought it was important to do it now because of how we see the AI exponential reshaping what Ramp can be. Decisions of company strategy are increasingly decisions of technology and systems design. We have always believed every function should be approached as a systems-engineering problem (even when the system was primarily human) but the rise of machine intelligence makes this existential. Every part of the company must be positioned to leverage the continued explosion in model intelligence and capabilities. 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.

We are also making Rahul Sengottuvelu our CTO. @rahulgs has led Applied AI at Ramp since joining us three years ago through the acquisition of his prior company, Cohere. Before that, his first company 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. He has also been right on nearly every major technical direction in AI well before it was obvious. Building Ramp now means applying AI to every part of it, and Rahul is the person stepping up to lead that work.

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. The businesses that trust us are navigating the same shift we are, and we intend to be there for all of it: managing their token spend, supercharging their finance teams, and helping them get more out of every dollar and hour.

- Eric & Karim