In August, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered a stark message at a dinner in San Francisco: We are in an AI bubble, and it’s going to pop. “A lot of people are going to lose a phenomenal amount of money,” Altman told journalists. He likened it to the dotcom crash, but potentially worse.
A few weeks later, Altman’s board chair and fellow AI founder Bret Taylor backed him up: “It is both true that AI will transform the economy [and that] we’re also in a bubble.”
A seemingly endless amount of capital has whipped up the froth for both tech incumbents and startups, which are receiving eye-popping valuations faster than ever. Lots of these companies will implode. But the underlying technology will keep improving regardless of any short-term bubble, and some companies will emerge as the Googles and Amazons of the AI era.
One of the fastest-rising startups today is Ramp, operating in the oh-so-unsexy corporate finance and credit card space. It was founded in 2019 by Karim Atiyeh and Eric Glyman, a duo who had sold their first fintech company to Capital One in an eight-figure deal. With Ramp, they set out to create a unicorn—a startup with a $1 billion valuation—in two years.
No New York–based startup had ever achieved that. Yet sure enough, by the time Ramp hit its second anniversary, it was valued at $1.6 billion. This summer, that number shot up to $22.5 billion. Ramp also announced (exclusively in Fortune) a new milestone: It had surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue.
