Dive Brief:

• Fintech Ramp, which sells financial-management software, is expanding its offerings to the accounting industry with the launch Wednesday of an artificial intelligence operating system that will tackle basic accounting tasks, according to a press release.
• In addition, Ramp said Thursday in a separate release that it had raised $750 million in equity financing, which it aims to invest in further expansion of its artificial intelligence capabilities. The funding boosted Ramp’s value to $44 billion, the company said. Iconiq Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm; Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund GIC; and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan invested.
• As for the accounting product, it’s dubbed “Ramp Stack,” and its use cases range from handling the monthly close to reconciling cash and managing code transactions and post journal entries, a company spokesperson said in an email. 

Dive Insight:

Ramp’s latest capital raise brought its total equity funding to about $3 billion, according to a Thursday press release.

The company’s total payment volume rose 170% year-over-year in March, which was its “highest growth rate in three years, despite the business being roughly 20x the size,” the company said. The volume was driven partially by companies’ spending on AI token as employees embrace the technology for efficiency in their work.

“For 500 years, business ran on two pillars of spend: people and vendors. In the last 24 months, a third arrived – intelligence, paid by the token and invisible to every system we've built to manage cost,” Ramp co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman said in the release.

Founded in 2019, New York-based Ramp – like rivals that include Airbase, BILL and Brex – offers corporate clients tools that handle tasks such as expense management, accounting, travel and procurement along with corporate cards and software to analyze and optimize corporate spending.

The new accounting system’s accuracy and auditability isn’t possible with general purpose large language models, according to a Ramp spokesperson. “The firms we work with aren’t asking for another AI tool to prompt,” Geoff Charles, Ramp’s chief product officer, said in a statement. “They need something that actually does the work, with every decision reviewable and auditable. That's what Stack is built to do.”

The launch comes as Big Four firms are seeking to tailor AI offerings themselves. Earlier this month, KPMG announced it had signed a global partnership with Anthropic to provide new capabilities for certain clients.  

Ramp said its product outperformed general purpose models on more than 200 accounting tasks. The release included a statement from Tyler Otto, president and owner of Specialized Accounting, saying the tool is eliminating or reducing the amount of time the company spends on a month-end close by 50% on some clients.

The new product marks the company’s entry into the accounting firm market which is estimated to be a roughly $150 billion industry, according to the release. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on Ramp’s $750 million funding campaign last month, citing people familiar with the matter.