Torpago, a commercial credit card and spend management provider, is no different, but with one caveat — banks are who it builds technology for, particularly community banks.
“We started as a competitor with Brex and Ramp, as well as American Express and Capital One,” Jackson told TechCrunch.
The Torpago Powered By tools and infrastructure enable means that those banks’ to customers don’t have to leave the bank’s brand domain to get sophisticated fintech features.
Banks have all the customers, and they have all the card volume, but “they have the absolute worst credit card tools and technology,” he said.
Since making the shift to banks as customers, that was whittled down to 300 companies while it goes after bank customers.
Spend management startup Ramp has raised another $150 million at a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today.
New investor Khosla Ventures and existing backer Founders Fund co-led the raise, which also included participation from new backers Sequoia Capital, Greylock and 8VC.
Other existing investors Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Sands Capital, D1 Capital, Lux Capital, Iconiq Capital, Definition Capital, Contrary Capital also put money into the latest round.
Apparently, there were no hard feelings on the part of Founders Fund, which still participated in the financing, even without Rabois.
(It’s worth noting that Rabois originally represented Founders Fund and has sat on Ramp’s board since 2019.)
Despite all that growth, Eric Gylman, the co-founder and CEO of Ramp thinks that the industry, and companies like his, are just scratching the surface.
Glyman and his current co-founder Karim Atiyeh launched their first fintech startup, Paribus, back in 2014.
The company raised a mere $2 million before getting snapped up by Capital One.
When the team was building Paribus, the generative AI technology to craft the emails was still relatively rudimentary and the rest of the company’s AI technology was built on very simple language models.
The startup has raised more than $1.7 billion from venture capitalists and was last valued at $5.8 billion in August 2023.
When Apex Space emerged from stealth last October, the company had a provocative goal: remove the “new bottleneck” hitting the space industry by manufacturing satellite buses at scale.
To get there, Apex announced today that it has opened a new headquarters and production facility in California that will eventually scale up to manufacture 50 satellite platforms annually.
Apex wants to disrupt one of the more entrenched parts of the space industry.
In general, satellite buses have been built to order at a very high cost and with very long lead times.
Apex is planning on flying its first Aries on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 ride-share mission scheduled for the first quarter of next year.
