Dive Brief:
- American Express said Thursday that it plans to buy Hypercard Network, a startup based in New York that uses artificial intelligence in providing automated expense management services to businesses. An Amex spokesperson declined to comment on the price paid for the business.
- The startup, which also goes by the name Hyper, partnered with Amex in 2024 to offer a loyalty card program with “embedded AI-powered expense agents,” Amex said in a Thursday press release announcing the acquisition. The companies expect to close the newly announced combination in the current quarter.
- Amex will put the Hyper team to work on a product launch later this year. Those professionals have “deep expertise in designing and deploying AI agents” that will contribute to Amex efforts to “build next-generation AI capabilities into our products and services, including our expense management platform,” Amex’s group president of global commercial services, Raymond Joabar, said in the release.
Dive Insight:
Hyper was founded in 2022 by two young entrepreneurs, Marc Baghadjian and Nikolas Ioannou. They conceived of the company initially as providing a means for companies to reward their employees with consumer credit cards, according to a school newspaper report from Babson College, which Baghadjian attended.
That 2023 article said Baghadjian and Ioannou raised half of the $4.5 million in funds fueling the startup at that time from Sam Altman, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which provides ChatGPT bot services. Altman, who is a serial venture capitalist, also invested in the digital payments company Stripe, estimated to be worth about $160 billion as of this year.
The Amex spokesperson declined to comment on total Hyper funds raised.
The move follows on another Amex expense manager acquisition last year. The card company agreed last year to purchase Center, a maker of expense-management software, to expand its offerings across commercial card payments and automated accounting and create a “seamless expense management platform,” it said at the time.
American Express will tap the Hyper team to build up its AI-powered offerings aimed at assisting companies in automating business processes and operating more efficiently.
“Hyper’s team of AI experts will help American Express continue to build agentic tools and AI-powered solutions that help businesses automate processes and simplify operations,” the release said.
In his annual letter last month, Amex Chairman and CEO Stephen Squeri wrote that he expects AI-powered agents will increasingly help consumers and businesses find products and services, pursue purchases and complete transactions, whether in booking travel, making dinner reservations to replenishing business inventories.
“Advancements in AI are creating a structural shift in the way colleagues work and how businesses operate, compete, and create value – and we are embracing it,” Squeri wrote in the letter.
He also explained that the New York company, which includes a bank, has explored “hundreds of AI use cases” in recent years in its quest to incorporate the evolving technology. It has considered AI applications across functions that include sales, engineering and customer service.
