Ramp’s $500m raise: Will autonomous AI agents make spreadsheets obsolete for CFOs?

Ramp Business Corporation has raised $500 million in a Series E‑2 round that values the United States‑based fintech at $22.5 billion. The funding, led by ICONIQ Capital, comes only 45 days after Ramp’s previous $200 million Series E round, adding $6.5 billion to its valuation in less than two months.

The company’s narrative is clear: traditional finance workflows built around spreadsheets and manual approvals are running out of time. Ramp is betting that autonomous AI agents can handle the tedious, repetitive work of finance teams, leaving human staff to focus on strategic decisions.

How is Ramp Business Corporation using AI agents to challenge manual finance workflows?

Ramp has introduced autonomous AI agents capable of reviewing and approving expenses, detecting potential policy violations, and coding transactions automatically. These agents work continuously in the background, identifying issues that would normally take hours of human review.

Early adopters, including Notion, Webflow, and Quora, have reported that the agents can reduce manual reviews by as much as 85 percent while catching up to 15 times more policy violations. In practical terms, this means a transaction that once required multiple staff touchpoints can now move through the system almost instantly, with human intervention only needed for flagged anomalies.

Chief Executive Officer Eric Glyman has framed the transition as the beginning of autonomous finance with human oversight. In his recent customer communication, he suggested that finance teams of the near future will operate “in parallel,” where policy checks, reconciliations, and approvals happen simultaneously through AI agents, eliminating bottlenecks that currently force finance into slow, sequential processes.

Why does Ramp’s $500 million raise matter for the future of corporate finance?

The $500 million raise is more than just a capital injection. It signals strong institutional belief that agentic AI can transform back‑office finance. Ramp now serves over 40,000 companies and processes more than $80 billion in annualized purchase volume, ranging from startups to enterprises in real estate, SaaS, and defense.

The company reported positive cash flow earlier this year, supported by multi‑product adoption and its Ramp Treasury offering, which has crossed $1 billion in assets under management in under six months. Investors see this as proof that Ramp is not only a high‑growth startup but also a fintech capable of sustaining itself while expanding aggressively into AI‑driven workflows.

By combining capital efficiency with technological ambition, Ramp is positioning itself as a frontrunner in the autonomous finance category, a space that legacy providers like Brex, American Express, SAP Concur, and Oracle NetSuite are also eyeing as they roll out their own automation features.

Could spreadsheets soon become obsolete for CFOs?

While few expect spreadsheets to vanish completely, analysts believe their role in day‑to‑day finance is shrinking. Tasks like expense reconciliation, policy compliance, and low‑risk approvals can increasingly be handled without human entry or review. CFOs will likely still rely on spreadsheets for scenario modeling and strategic planning, but the repetitive work that dominated finance teams for decades is quickly migrating to platforms like Ramp.

For companies embracing autonomous finance, the benefits are increasingly difficult to ignore. Automated policy enforcement and real‑time transaction coding enable faster month‑end and quarter‑end closes, reducing the manual backlog that often delays reporting. By eliminating repetitive data entry and spreadsheet‑based reconciliations, finance teams can significantly lower error rates, which in turn improves audit readiness and regulatory compliance.

Equally important, autonomous finance allows CFOs to redeploy human capital toward higher‑value activities such as scenario planning, cash‑flow forecasting, and strategic analysis, rather than clerical reviews or expense chasing. In organizations that implement AI agents effectively, the finance department shifts from a cost‑center model to a data‑driven decision partner for the business.

If Ramp Business Corporation continues to deliver tangible productivity gains—including shorter close cycles, higher policy adherence, and measurable savings on labor hours—traditional spreadsheets could steadily transition from daily operating tools to secondary or backup resources. Over time, this evolution could redefine the corporate finance technology stack, making AI‑driven expense management and autonomous workflows the default approach for modern enterprises.