BILL: Divvy vs Ramp

Divvy corporate spend management competitor, Ramp, has had explosive growth since it launched in 2020. In April 2021 it was worth 1.6B and today it is now valued at 8.1B!

Apparently they have nearly 10x their revenue year over year per Techcrunch

Divvy had 7.6B in annualized payment volume and 15,500 spending businesses as of Dec 31, 2021.

Meanwhile for Ramp as of March 2022, they have 5B annualized payment volume and 5000 businesses (and 2000 of them are “enterprise” according to their website).

It sure seems Ramp is growing faster although still smaller, and Ramp is ahead of Divvy in terms of integrations if you peruse the website. A competitor to look out for BILL. But at least Ramp’s valuation means divvy should be inflating BILL’s market cap up :slightly_smiling_face:

From the article:

Much has changed since Ramp’s February 2020 launch. While the company started out focused on small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), it now works with “businesses of all sizes” — from startups to multibillion-dollar enterprises to potato farmers. Today, more than 5,000 businesses use Ramp, powering over $5 billion in annualized payments volume. Notably, its customer base is up 7x and cardholder growth is up 15x year-over-year. Some of its larger customers spend “in excess of $10 million a month” with Ramp, Glyman said.

“It took us over two years to reach 10,000 cumulative cardholders, and now we are adding that many in a month,” he added.

The startup has also expanded beyond a corporate card offering into other services, with the goal of helping companies generally automate their finances. For example, Ramp last year made its first acquisition when picking up negotiation-as-a-service startup Buyer with the goal of helping its customers save money on SaaS contracts. Last October, it began offering integrated automated bill payments for all its customers, and earlier this year it expanded into the travel segment.

Earlier this month, Ramp also announced a partnership with Amazon for Business, in which customers can connect their Amazon Business account to Ramp and then anytime an employee uses one of its cards to make a purchase, Ramp automatically pulls the receipt.

“It will provide full itemized-level detail, so if a customer wants to go and attach or move certain line items to different parts of their general ledger, they can do it,” Glyman said. It’s free for the customer. Several thousand of its customers are using it regularly.

Over the past year, the company has quadrupled its workforce to 275 and is in the process of opening a new office in Miami, where co-founder and CTO Karim Atiyeh recently relocated.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/21/corporate-spend-startup-ra…

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jonwayne235,

Always appreciate the research. Enjoy your DD. Here is additional insight into Ramp by one of the investing VC’s and it has some insight on Ramp’s Bill Pay product (I realize Bill.com is much more than bill pay).

https://www.notboring.co/p/ramping-up?s=r

The depth is great and investors in Bill.com need to read the whole thing but especially the sections on Ramp’s Bill Pay product. A curious mind will want to read it all.

What Bill.com is doing is cool and certainly valuable to their customers. They have created a network effect that is powerful. It’s a strong moat and I look for strong moats. The author/VC acknowledges that in his post.

The author states:

“It has incredibly strong distribution and network effects – as evidenced by the fact that I still use it because the companies who pay me use it”

But something you never want to hear from a customer is that your product sucks but they use it because there isn’t anything better.

Bill.com is the worst software I use to run Not Boring by a country mile…”

It sounds like their product has a lot of room to improve which scares me if a company (Ramp) that has a 1000% focus on customer experience, and growing 18% MoM, wants to give away at least 1 of the products that generates revenue for Bill.com all while giving the customer a great experience.

From the author (Packy McCormick)

“But in October, Ramp publicly launched Bill Pay.”

“Ramp would essentially be giving away Bill’s product as a free add-on.“

Bill.com is going to be harder to kill than just an announcement. I learned that lesson the hard way. It has incredibly strong distribution and network effects – as evidenced by the fact that I still use it because the companies who pay me use it – and Ramp’s product isn’t fully developed yet. For example, it handles the Accounts Payable side but not the Accounts Receivable side, which means I could use it to pay bills but not to send invoices.“

“Still, I’ve used the product (Ramp’s) and it’s so much better and faster than Bill. It reads and itemizes invoices with 99.9% accuracy. And it’s growing. Without marketing the product beyond current customers, it’s grown 70% MoM since launching publicly, and it’s already starting to show synergistic effects with the card. Card customers are much less likely to churn, for example, if they’re using Bill Pay.”

Ramp appears to be built to iterate at an incredible fast pace. That is a competitive advantage that can’t be overstated.

I’m guessing that Rene, Bill’s CEO, is aware of the progress that Ramp is making and Divvy was a move meant to compete against Ramp. Maybe that was already on their roadmap but I doubt it.

There can be multiple winners in this space. It’s a big space. But my #1 & #2 investing criteria is management. As much as I like Rene, and I do, this management team seems stronger, better equipped and hungrier backed by VC’s that want to see their investment win.

If so inclined, read the whole thing and see note that Ramp is not a competitor to Bill.com. Its mission is much bigger and that could be a problem for itself. Too many things to too many people. Or, it could mean that it’s size will allow it to offer products such as Bill’s products as “add-ons” at a lower price or free.

If Ramp is able to compete effectively against Bill.com (seems very likely) then it could be very impactful on Bill.com’s future growth which is a metric that we all understand is vital for this investing strategy. I’ve highlighted only a few items. Read Packy’s write up. It’s well done and insightful. It’s a really interesting space and Ramp is approaching it in a fascinating way.

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