Expense management startup Ramp has acquired the team of a three-person startup called Jolt AI with the intent of making its engineers “as productive as possible,” the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
While a relatively small acquisition, the deal is significant in that it’s representative of the role that artificial intelligence is playing in many of the fastest-growing venture-backed startups — even those that aren’t necessarily strictly AI companies.
New York-based fintech Ramp is definitely among that rapidly growing bunch, having achieved a valuation of $22.5 billion, as well as annualized revenue of $1 billion, in 2025. That’s up from a valuation of $13 billion just a few months earlier in March, as well as an increase from annualized revenue of $700 million as of January.
The company says it began “generating cash flow” earlier this year.
Jolt AI has raised just under $2.5 million in funding since its 2022 inception from investors such as Alumni Ventures, 8-Bit Capital, and Engineering Capital. The startup initially was a load testing platform before pivoting in 2024 to launch an AI coding assistant for large production-scale code, according to CEO and founder Yev Spektor.
More startups buying startups
Besides being strategic for Ramp, acquisition is also representative of an uptick in the number of startups buying other startups. In the first three quarters of 2025, there were 647 reported M&A deals globally in which startups bought other startups, according to Crunchbase data. That compares to 539 in the same period last year, a 20% increase.
For comparison’s sake, in the full years 2021 and 2022, there were nearly 1,000 deals in which startups bought other startups, per Crunchbase data.
‘Making engineers radically more productive’
Karim Atiyeh, co-founder and CTO of Ramp, told Crunchbase News that one of the reasons that his company has grown so quickly is because of the focus it has “put on product velocity and overall efficiency.”
“The need for both of those is even more important now with AI and agentic work taking hold in finance,” he said.
He claims that thanks in part to AI, Ramp customers can get 3x more done in Ramp today than they could just two years ago.
“And in the next two years we want that to be 30x,” Atiyeh said. “We think the way to get there is by focusing on AI and agentic workflows, making Ramp’s platform dramatically more powerful. We’re focused on hiring the best engineering talent there is to make this happen and then, importantly, making our engineers as productive as possible.”
That’s what got him so excited about the Jolt team. Their entire focus, Atiyey said, “is on making engineers radically more productive — helping them ship faster.”
Jolt AI’s 2024 pivot proved to be the right move. So much so in fact that the CEO of one of its early customers introduced the small startup to Atiyeh and Ramp earlier this year.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Ramp’s purchase, notably, involved only the company’s three-person team, and not its product.
“Jolt is a team of world-class engineers who have spent years solving some of the hardest problems in developer productivity,” Atiyeh said. “They’re now bringing that expertise to Ramp’s developer tools and beyond. I’m most excited to see what their team can do within Ramp, so that’s what this deal was focused on.”
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Ramping up
Today, Ramp has more than 45,000 customers, up from over 30,000 in early March. Those customers include Shopify, Anduril Industries, Notion, Cursor, CBRE, Stripe, Poshmark, ZipRecruiter, Olipop, Glossier, and Construction One, among others.
Presently, Ramp has 1,200 employees. The Jolt team — made up of Spektor, Jon Reynolds (CTO) and Carlos Kelly (principal engineer) — will integrate into Ramp’s engineering platform team with a “core focus on helping engineers build faster.”
“They’re going to do this by strengthening our core AI platform and infrastructure, supercharging our dev experience, and transforming product and tooling with applied AI,” Atiyeh said.
The trio is also going to be working on Ramp’s AI and agentic products for its customers, he added.
It’s not the first time that Ramp has acquired AI-related companies. In 2023, it picked up Cohere in an effort to accelerate AI-powered customer support. And in 2024, it acquired Venue to automate procurement workflows.
“From a talent perspective, Ramp’s engineering team is made up of founders, math olympiads, and AI researchers,” Atiyeh told Crunchbase News. “…My goal is to hire elite technical talent, and then get out of their way.”
For his part, Jolt’s Spektor admitted in an interview that he didn’t expect to get acquired by a company like Ramp, but that he’s “extremely happy” it is where his team landed.
The trio will be working on a number of things including Ramp’s internal engineering platform.
“Some of that does involve AI tooling. Our whole goal is to make sure engineers are as fast and effective as possible,” Spektor said. “And on the customer facing side of thins, there’s a lot of development around bringing AI agents and features to financial workflows. So we’ll be helping out in that department as well.”
Bottom line, according to Atiyeh, AI is changing the way Ramp uses and builds software.
“With the Jolt team on board, we’re doubling down on both fronts,” Atiyeh wrote in a blog post, “building the internal AI devtools that help our engineers ship at high velocity, and creating products that save finance teams time and money at scale.”
Over the years, Ramp has built a name for itself in the corporate card and expense management space. It’s branched out into travel, bill pay, and, in January, released a new treasury product that had it encroaching into digital bank territory.
Its latest acquisition is in line with what experts are seeing in 2025. Earlier this year, Lindsey S. Mignano, co-founder of SSM Law, noted an interesting trend she’s seeing: more asset acquisitions plus acqui-hires.
She said one reason for that increase is a rush to market, most particularly in the extremely competitive AI field and with companies who have incorporated AI in their offerings..
Indeed, Ramp operates in an extremely competitive space against the likes of Navan – which recently filed an S-1 to go public despite being far from profitable – Mercury, and Brex. In an October 2 blog post, Brex CEO and co-founder Pedro Franceschi wrote that his company “was operating cash flow positive for the first time in history.”
Since its 2019 inception, New York-based Ramp says it has raised a total of $1.9 billion in equity funding. Investors include Iconiq Capital, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Stripe, Citi, Lux Capital and Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures), T. Rowe Price and Operator Collective.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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