A look at three startups making credit cards for businesses, Ramp, Divvy, and Brex, which have collectively received over $1B in funding and debt
- Investors have placed big bets on business credit cards — American Express is still handily the largest player
Context & Ripple Effects
When Bloomberg profiled Ramp, Divvy, and Brex in March 2020, the trio had already pulled in over $1B in funding and debt to attack a market where American Express still dominated. The piece landed mid-arc: Brex had gone from a $1.1B valuation in late 2018 to talks above $2B by mid-2019, and the profile framed investor appetite for startup-focused corporate cards as a settled bet rather than an experiment.
What came after confirmed the thesis. Ramp moved toward a Stripe-led round at a reported $1.6B valuation within a year, while Brex stacked a $150M Series C extension onto a $425M Series D led by Tiger Global at $7.4B, before reaching a reported $12.3B by October 2021 — the profile captured these companies just before their steepest capital climb.
First-order effects
- Ramp, Divvy, and Brex gain validation and ammunition: the $1B-plus collective war chest lets each underwrite more card volume against startups that traditional issuers decline.
- American Express faces its first credible challenger cohort in business cards, with Brex alone scaling from a $1.1B valuation in 2018 toward ten-figure rounds.
Second-order effects
- Rivalry among the three forces product differentiation beyond the card itself — Ramp's pitch centers on expense-management tooling, pushing the category toward software bundles where pricing power sits with whoever owns the spend workflow.
- Stripe's reported lead on Ramp's round signals infrastructure players want exposure to corporate-card economics, adding strategic capital that pure financial investors can't match.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, business credit becomes underwritten on company data and software integration rather than personal guarantees, structurally loosening the incumbent advantage that kept American Express dominant.
- Capital concentration into a handful of card startups points toward consolidation: the survivors will be those whose funding cadence — like Brex's run from Series C to a reported $12.3B — outpaces rivals burning to win share.
The trend: Venture capital is systematically funding startup-focused corporate-card challengers, escalating valuations quarter over quarter as they chip at American Express's dominance in business credit.