director of eng @tryramp, co-founder @lumosidentity (@a16z and @neo), cs @stanford, forbes 5 under 5

Joined July 2015
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Services are the future. Today we launched Ramp’s AI services motion. It's easy to buy an AI subscription. It's hard to transform your company to actually run on agents. Here’s our entire strategy. 1) Why now Services are the new software (Sequoia) Human labor TAM >> software license TAM. The market is bearish on seats and subscriptions. Every enterprise AI company is doing this -- the labs have poured billions into services partnerships and their own deployment functions. Superintelligent models alone are not enough. Palantir proved this is a strong business model: deeply embed engineers, build on top of a powerful platform, and customize extensively. 2) The real problem Companies want AI. But the gap between "we have AI tools" and "agents run our workflows and we spend way less time" is enormous. What we've found across over 50 companies we engaged with: agents start replacing real work when there is: complete data, read/write access across systems, agent-friendly policies. Most big companies struggle because: - processes live in operators' heads - dozens of disconnected systems (legacy ERPs, endless one-off excel sheets, etc.) - archaic software with poor or no API access Good data in the right place is a hard prereq to working agents. Also, vibing in localhost ≠ a production system your enterprise can rely on. You still need hosting, ci/cd, observability, feedback loops, good interfaces. And taste to know what's even worth automating. Everyone has a bulldozer, but most jobs just need a shovel pointed at the right spot. What companies usually need is to be made agent-friendly. That's exactly what we do. 3) What we do We focus on what Ramp does best -- finance. And we embed FDEs that: -> understand your problems -> identify high-leverage, high-impact workflows that fit agents -> scope the solution -> connect your data -> capture your context -> deploy agents and often bespoke software for humans to collaborate with them -> drive the business metrics that matter Discovery and scoping are crucial. Building is easier than ever and thus judgement about what to build is more important than ever. We're not a generic AI services arm, we're finance domain experts. Across the spectrum of financial operations, we help companies find and frame the problems worth automating -- similar to the taste a founder has in choosing which problems are worth solving (ex-founders make great FDEs). Here’s the stack we deliver: - Production infrastructure. Shipping an index.html from Claude isn't the same as creating a repo, hosting in a cloud service, ci/cd, testing, setting up evals, managing memories and skills, adding feedback loops, ensuring uptime, incident management, etc. Agents don't one-shot production systems yet. Production software is hard -- we build, host, and run it for you in a single-tenant, dedicated cloud environment. Most operators don’t have the time, knowledge, or experience to do this e2e. We help abstract the low-leverage plumbing so they can focus on the essential parts of their jobs. - Data connectivity. Most enterprises have data lakes, but data is often incorrect, stale, or entirely missing. And write interfaces vary dramatically. Ideally we can use MCPs or CLIs, but usually it’s poorly documented APIs, SFTP, manual uploads, and email. - A context layer. Things people have done for years aren't written down, so an agent can't do them until we capture that context -- ranging from simple policies to complex decisions. This usually involves creating policy documents, shared agent memories, and skills. - Evals and feedback loops. How you know an agent is doing a good job, and how it improves over time. 4) Why Ramp AI Solutions We focus on finance because it’s the vertical we know deeply, have structural advantages, and are most differentiated: - Data. 70k customers use our core product, over $200B in annual payments, years of vendor data, millions of transactions and bills monthly. - Money-movement primitives and partnerships. Global money movement rails, partnerships with banks, Visa, Stripe, etc. You don’t want to vibecode international wires for bill payments. - An intelligence layer on top: fraud detection from hundreds of millions of expenses, PO-to-invoice matching, state-of-the-art OCR, and fine-tuned models for accounting coding, spend routing, policy review, etc. Unlike the labs, we’re not incentivized to sell tokens. Ramp is an AI fiduciary and an impartial broker to deliver AI that is: - model-agnostic -- we benchmark all the leading models (labs, open source) and fit the right one to each task - and token-efficient by design Our main incentive is business outcomes -- which is Ramp’s mission, to save our customers time and money. I’m extremely bullish about our motion, and the broad industry growth of AI-native services. If you're a finance leader trying to be more agent-native, If you’re interested in joining our FDE team, I’d love to talk 🙂
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Excited to be speaking at the AI Engineer conference next week!
Forward Deployed Engineering is the most critical ingredient for Enterprise AI adoption. It’s why the most important companies on the planet are investing so heavily into it. That’s why we put together the Forward Deployed track at this year’s AI Engineer World’s Fair on Tuesday, June 30. Learn about the current state of the industry and where its headed from the people and companies leading the charge. Everything it REALLY takes to deploy agents in production and transition our economy to the new world order Don’t miss it :) (more details and link in comments) ↓
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Services are the future. Today we launched Ramp’s AI services motion. It's easy to buy an AI subscription. It's hard to transform your company to actually run on agents. Here’s our entire strategy. 1) Why now Services are the new software (Sequoia) Human labor TAM >> software license TAM. The market is bearish on seats and subscriptions. Every enterprise AI company is doing this -- the labs have poured billions into services partnerships and their own deployment functions. Superintelligent models alone are not enough. Palantir proved this is a strong business model: deeply embed engineers, build on top of a powerful platform, and customize extensively. 2) The real problem Companies want AI. But the gap between "we have AI tools" and "agents run our workflows and we spend way less time" is enormous. What we've found across over 50 companies we engaged with: agents start replacing real work when there is: complete data, read/write access across systems, agent-friendly policies. Most big companies struggle because: - processes live in operators' heads - dozens of disconnected systems (legacy ERPs, endless one-off excel sheets, etc.) - archaic software with poor or no API access Good data in the right place is a hard prereq to working agents. Also, vibing in localhost ≠ a production system your enterprise can rely on. You still need hosting, ci/cd, observability, feedback loops, good interfaces. And taste to know what's even worth automating. Everyone has a bulldozer, but most jobs just need a shovel pointed at the right spot. What companies usually need is to be made agent-friendly. That's exactly what we do. 3) What we do We focus on what Ramp does best -- finance. And we embed FDEs that: -> understand your problems -> identify high-leverage, high-impact workflows that fit agents -> scope the solution -> connect your data -> capture your context -> deploy agents and often bespoke software for humans to collaborate with them -> drive the business metrics that matter Discovery and scoping are crucial. Building is easier than ever and thus judgement about what to build is more important than ever. We're not a generic AI services arm, we're finance domain experts. Across the spectrum of financial operations, we help companies find and frame the problems worth automating -- similar to the taste a founder has in choosing which problems are worth solving (ex-founders make great FDEs). Here’s the stack we deliver: - Production infrastructure. Shipping an index.html from Claude isn't the same as creating a repo, hosting in a cloud service, ci/cd, testing, setting up evals, managing memories and skills, adding feedback loops, ensuring uptime, incident management, etc. Agents don't one-shot production systems yet. Production software is hard -- we build, host, and run it for you in a single-tenant, dedicated cloud environment. Most operators don’t have the time, knowledge, or experience to do this e2e. We help abstract the low-leverage plumbing so they can focus on the essential parts of their jobs. - Data connectivity. Most enterprises have data lakes, but data is often incorrect, stale, or entirely missing. And write interfaces vary dramatically. Ideally we can use MCPs or CLIs, but usually it’s poorly documented APIs, SFTP, manual uploads, and email. - A context layer. Things people have done for years aren't written down, so an agent can't do them until we capture that context -- ranging from simple policies to complex decisions. This usually involves creating policy documents, shared agent memories, and skills. - Evals and feedback loops. How you know an agent is doing a good job, and how it improves over time. 4) Why Ramp AI Solutions We focus on finance because it’s the vertical we know deeply, have structural advantages, and are most differentiated: - Data. 70k customers use our core product, over $200B in annual payments, years of vendor data, millions of transactions and bills monthly. - Money-movement primitives and partnerships. Global money movement rails, partnerships with banks, Visa, Stripe, etc. You don’t want to vibecode international wires for bill payments. - An intelligence layer on top: fraud detection from hundreds of millions of expenses, PO-to-invoice matching, state-of-the-art OCR, and fine-tuned models for accounting coding, spend routing, policy review, etc. Unlike the labs, we’re not incentivized to sell tokens. Ramp is an AI fiduciary and an impartial broker to deliver AI that is: - model-agnostic -- we benchmark all the leading models (labs, open source) and fit the right one to each task - and token-efficient by design Our main incentive is business outcomes -- which is Ramp’s mission, to save our customers time and money. I’m extremely bullish about our motion, and the broad industry growth of AI-native services. If you're a finance leader trying to be more agent-native, If you’re interested in joining our FDE team, I’d love to talk 🙂
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launch site ramp.com/applied-ai-solution…
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It’s just incredible @jackclarkSF writes Import AI weekly (with extreme consistency) while being a cofounder of and holding a leadership role at Anthropic
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Ramp’s product is nearly self-building Blocker from customer posted to channel -> autonomously scoped spec -> delivery via coding agent Engineers are still a bit involved today But soon we’ll have full delivery via software factory Goal is to scale by tokens, not by headcount
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This is one of the most exciting projects on our forward deployed engineering team Is challenging because evals for what FDEs do is hard Ambiguous, incomplete requirements -> well scoped spec aligned with roadmap, over a multi-turn agent-led conversation
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Leo Mehr reposted
Today we're thrilled to announce the @a16z FDE fellowship! A new 8-week cohort for world-class FDEs and Applied AI leaders at the forefront of deploying AI into real-world enterprises. We've already got an incredible lineup, including... - Perry Ha, VP, Agent Product at Decagon - Senta Knuth, Enterprise Product Deployment at ElevenLabs - Rohan Chandra, Regional Director, AI Deployment at Cursor - Isabel Gomez, Technical Deployment Lead at OpenAI, prev Palantir - @nikogrupen, Head of Applied Research at Harvey - @barrald, Cofounder & CEO at Hex, prev Palantir - @lkothari, GM, AI FDE at Snowflake, prev VP Product at Scale - @LeoMehr, director of engineering at Ramp - @zkevinbai, founding FDE at Rippling, prev Palantir - Gene Karshenboym, Director of Engineering, Operations and Strategy at Google, prev CEO at Phiar and many more. Join us! Apps went live today, and the fellowship kicks off in July 2026. Link in thread:
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don't spend precious human time buying things -- have your agents buy for you! available to everyone on Ramp
Ramp Agent Cards is now self-serve! > ramp funds enroll ask your agent the next time you need to make a purchase!
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CLI is the way to go -- hyped about this launch! Now easier than ever for agents to use Ramp
Today, we're releasing Ramp CLI to let agents manage your company's finances. 50 tools across cards, bills, expenses, travel, and approvals. Fewer tokens than MCP, and comes with pre-built skills like receipt compliance and agentic purchasing.
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1/ FDE conference in SF last week. Signal is clear -- FDE is industry standard for B2B companies 🔥
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4/ 🤝 the best FDE teams aren't siloed -- tight feedback loop with core product, active contributions to core codebase ✂️ "Always be scoping" always comes up. Question requirements, never accept them at face value
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we launched agents.ramp.com today builders are already using agents to purchase on their behalf, but pasting your credit card details is completely uncontrolled and unsafe give your agents ramp cards to have visibility and control over their spend
Today, we're launching Ramp Agent Cards. There's been no safe way for agents to spend money, until now. Ramp Agent Cards give agents the ability to spend, governed with real spend limits, merchant controls, and full visibility into every transaction.
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engineer -> agent manager -> ... ?
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Our rate of growth, incredibly, is accelerating Why? Customers love the product, AI features drive real value for users, our newest verticals are growing dramatically, we continue bringing on such talented teammates It is still early, the road ahead is very long
Today, Ramp raised another $300M at a $32B valuation. In the past year our revenue has doubled to over $1B, growing 10x faster than the median public SaaS. We all know money talks — we're teaching it to think. Getting big no longer means getting slow.
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Pre-AGI, education is utilitarian, for getting a job. Post-AGI, education will be for fun and personal enrichment, much like people go to the gym today for health, not because their physical labor is needed
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If you're b2b you must win in enterprise, exactly @grinich 🎯 (engineering.ramp.com/post/fo…)
What do Slack, Figma, Airtable, and other top SaaS companies have in common? They all crossed the "Enterprise Chasm" and successfully moved upmarket. Here's how you can cross it too 🚀
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