Ramp Acquires Venue and Enhances Procurement Product

Ramp, a finance automation platform, acquired Venue, a procurement startup backed by Sequoia Capital.

The strategic move expands Ramp’s procurement capabilities and marks an expansion for the company as it aims to tackle inefficiencies across the entire financial tech stack, the company said in a Tuesday (Jan. 30) press release.

Venue, founded in 2022, focused on simplifying the procurement process for businesses, according to the release. The company built an intuitive solution that empowered employees to request what they needed while providing finance teams with visibility into all requests and corresponding spend.

Within a year, Venue gained traction, supporting customers with an average of 500 to 1,000 full-time employees and raising $1.2 million in financing, the release said.

With the acquisition of Venue, Ramp aims to automate and streamline procurement workflows and vendor management, per the release. The Venue team will spearhead projects such as customized intake forms, flexible approvals, purchase order management, and artificial intelligence-powered vendor management.

In addition to the acquisition, Ramp is launching improvements to its procurement product, according to the release. The enhancements offer businesses more control and insight into employee spend, accelerate review cycles, and identify opportunities to save on IT and software spend.

The new features include bi-directional integration with providers like Ironclad, dynamic intake forms, purchase order enhancements, collaboration tools, an activity feed, and seat intelligence that compares software use to seats purchased, the release said.

Ramp’s accounts payable product now processes over $10 billion in annualized AP volume, per the release. The growth of the company’s platform has been driven by businesses’ desire to eliminate the need for multiple disconnected tools.

In 2023, there was a growing adoption of data-informed spend management controls that increasingly brought transparency and oversight to the spend management landscape, PYMNTS reported in December.

For example, Uber for Business said in December that it integrated with Ramp and expense management provider Brex to automate receipt matching for Uber rides and meals. With this capability, companies can simplify expenses and save time.

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