Ramp CEO Eric Glyman on hitting $13B valuation, Super Bowl ROI, and why they marked down their own stock

Summary

Ramp hit a $13 billion valuation in its latest round, announced March 4, 2025 — a significant recovery from the $8.1 billion peak it reached in December 2021 before voluntarily marking its own stock down to $5.8 billion as interest rates rose. CEO Eric Glyman says that decision was deliberate: rather than leave employees holding grants priced against a stale number, Ramp went to the market, asked investors where they would price the company, and accepted the lower figure. The logic was straightforward — a DCF-implied valuation shrinks dramatically when the risk-free rate moves from near zero to 5–5.5%, and Glyman walked every employee through that math at an all-hands rather than leaving them to guess.

The move was unusual. Glyman argues most companies from the 2021 vintage still haven't marked to market, leaving employees technically underwater without knowing it. Ramp's willingness to take the hit — and then grow through it — is now the vindication story: the company grew 4x year-over-year in 2022, and Glyman says Ramp is now outgrowing comparable publicly traded companies while trading at far more reasonable multiples.

Super Bowl ROI

Ramp bought its Super Bowl slot 11 days before the game — late enough to know which teams were playing, which gave it the ability to sign Saquon Barkley as a relevant, high-profile talent rather than hedging on an unknown matchup. The late buy also meant Ramp picked up premium inventory from advertisers who had dropped out, including what Glyman describes as the final ad slot before kickoff, which aired nationally. Some markets saw the ad twice.

Glyman declines to give specific spend figures but says the cost was lower than observers assume and the impact larger. February was Ramp's biggest February on record by a wide margin, with acceleration in both new sales and brand perception. Barkley's continued media presence — including a Today Show appearance the following week that featured the Ramp partnership — extended the campaign beyond the single airing.

Market position

Ramp estimates it handles 1–2% of all corporate and small business card spend in the US, which Glyman uses to frame the remaining opportunity: 98–99% of the addressable market is untouched. His core pitch is structural — with average US business profit margins at 8.5%, a dollar of cost cut is mathematically equivalent to $12 of new revenue. That arithmetic doesn't change regardless of the macro environment, though the current climate of tariffs and government austerity makes the cost-saving message easier to land.

Board member Keith Rabois is the investor Glyman singles out as most influential, specifically citing Rabois's "barrels and bullets" framework — the idea that execution bottlenecks are cannons, not ammunition, and that hiring more high-output operators unlocks growth faster than adding headcount behind weak ones. Glyman says applying that input-focused discipline is a large part of why Ramp has pulled away from competitors in a space where the incumbents carry multi-hundred-billion-dollar market caps.