Karim Atiyeh

Co-Founder & Co-CEO Ramp

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Karim Atiyeh is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Ramp, the New York company that sells corporate cards bundled with software for controlling everything a business spends outside payroll. He and Eric Glyman started the company in 2019 and had been building together for five years before that, on a consumer price-tracking app they sold to Capital One. Atiyeh ran engineering as Chief Technology Officer, but the interesting detail is how little that title described the job: by the company’s own account he had for years also run risk, operations and marketing. In June 2026 the two co-founders took the title of Co-CEO jointly, which Glyman described in the announcement less as a change than as a formality — the recognition of a division of labour that had already been in place for some 2,656 days.

Career Highlights

• Co-Founder and, since June 2026, Co-CEO of Ramp, sharing the chief executive role with co-founder Eric Glyman.
• Served as Ramp’s Chief Technology Officer from the company’s 2019 founding until the June 2026 leadership change, when Rahul Sengottuvelu succeeded him in that role.
• Ran risk, operations and marketing at Ramp directly, alongside technology, for several years before the Co-CEO appointment.
• Co-founded Paribus, a Y Combinator-backed price-tracking application, and sold it to Capital One in 2016.
• Ramp reports more than 70,000 business customers, $12B+ saved on their behalf and 27M+ hours eliminated; its own press page cites Bloomberg for a $44 billion valuation on a $750 million round in June 2026.
• Holds a BA in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science, both from Harvard University.

Professional Journey

Atiyeh studied at Harvard, taking a BA in Electrical and Computer Engineering and then an MS in Computer Science. His first company was Paribus, co-founded with Eric Glyman and backed by Y Combinator. Paribus was a consumer product with a narrow, legible premise: it watched the prices of things you had already bought and claimed the difference back when they fell. Capital One acquired it in 2016.

Ramp followed in 2019, and it inverted the problem. Where Paribus recovered money after the fact for individuals, Ramp set out to change how companies spend it in the first place — a corporate card, issued with controls attached, wired into the software that approves, categorises and books the expense. The pitch to a finance team was never really about the card; it was that the card is the only place where spending is observable at the moment it happens, and that everything downstream of it is therefore automatable.

Atiyeh took the Chief Technology Officer title, but Ramp’s own description of the arrangement makes clear that it was not a functional boundary. He directly managed risk, operations and marketing for years. Glyman’s June 2026 post sets out the reasoning as a matter of design rather than convenience: at Ramp “technology is not a distinct part of the company — it is the entirety of it”, and every function is to be approached as a systems-engineering problem even when the system is primarily human. On that view a CTO who does not touch risk or operations is an artefact of an org chart nobody believes in.

The formal change came on 25 June 2026, when the two co-founders both took the title of Co-CEO. Ramp framed it as recognising what was already true — the two had shared critical decisions across every function since the beginning — and as preparation for a shift the company expects AI to force, in which questions of company strategy increasingly become questions of technology and systems design. Rahul Sengottuvelu, who had led Applied AI at Ramp since arriving three years earlier through the acquisition of his own company, became Chief Technology Officer in the same announcement.

Ramp is by its own published figures a substantial business: more than 70,000 customers, over $12 billion saved on their behalf, and, per Bloomberg coverage the company itself carries on its press page, a $44 billion valuation after raising $750 million in June 2026. The company is headquartered in New York.

Education

Harvard University

BA, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Harvard University

MS, Computer Science