Ramp, the New York-based financial operations platform co-founded by Lebanese entrepreneur Karim Atiyeh, has acquired Stockholm- and London-based payments platform Billhop to bring its corporate card and spend management tools to UK and European businesses for the first time.
The acquisition, announced on March 13, gives Ramp licensed payments infrastructure in both the UK and Sweden, with Billhop holding authorisations from the UK's Financial Conduct Authority and Sweden's Finansinspektionen that provide passporting rights across the European Economic Area. Financial terms were not disclosed. Billhop, founded in 2012, employs around 15 people and enables businesses to pay invoices by card even where suppliers do not accept card payments.
Ramp will open its first international offices in London and Stockholm as part of the deal and plans to begin onboarding UK- and EU-headquartered businesses directly from this summer, with a waitlist now open. The company said it would more than double its UK headcount within the next 12 months.
"We've spent years building Ramp into something the most ambitious US companies rely on," said co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman. "In their first year, the median Ramp customer saves 5% and grows revenue 16%. Europe is home to extraordinary companies. We can't wait to get to work."
Ramp, which combines corporate cards, expense management, vendor payments, procurement, travel booking and automated bookkeeping into a single platform, currently processes over $100 billion in purchases annually and serves more than 50,000 businesses. Nearly half of its customers already transact internationally across more than 180 countries each week. The company raised a $312 million Series E in November 2025 that valued it at $32 billion, and reports that its customers have collectively saved over $10 billion and 27.5 million hours since the platform launched in 2020.
The European push comes at a pivotal moment for the corporate spend management sector. In January 2026, Capital One announced a $5.15 billion deal to acquire Brex, Ramp's long-time US rival that was valued at $12.3 billion at its peak in 2022. Brex had itself been pursuing European expansion prior to the acquisition, having secured licensing to serve European-headquartered businesses.
Atiyeh, Ramp's co-founder and CTO, was born and raised in Beirut, where he attended Collège Notre-Dame de Jamhour before moving to the US to study at Harvard, earning a BA in electrical and computer engineering and an MS in computer science. After a stint at Oliver Wyman in New York, he co-founded Paribus, a YC-backed price tracking app, with Glyman and Gene Lee in 2014. The trio sold Paribus to Capital One in 2016, stayed for two years, then left to build Ramp in 2019.
As CTO, Atiyeh holds a roughly 10 per cent stake in the company, which made him a billionaire in 2025 with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion according to Forbes, making him the youngest Arab American billionaire in the US. He leads Ramp's product and engineering teams and has been central to the company's push into AI-powered financial automation, which he has described as building "self-driving finance" through policy agents that enforce spending rules and process invoices with minimal human intervention.
Announcing the European expansion on LinkedIn, Atiyeh struck a personal note, crediting his Lebanese upbringing with shaping his understanding of expense management. "My mom used to send me to the corner store with cash folded in my pocket and a mental note of exactly what to buy and how much change to bring back," he wrote. "She was, without knowing it, running the tightest expense management program I've ever seen."
Ramp's head of international, Jacob Wallenberg, will oversee the European operation. The company said it plans to grow teams across go-to-market, partnerships and operations from the London and Stockholm offices.
FWDstart included Atiyeh in its MENA Diaspora 50 earlier this year.
