Thread by @eglyman

The convergence of business payments has officially reached a fever pitch, with Bill.com, Divvy, Brex and, of course, @tryramp. Here’s a thread explaining forbes.com/sites/elizahav… 👇 (1/9)

Last week, Brex raised $425M at a $7B valuation while announcing Brex Premium (their version of a single spend management platform, like Ramp), and today news leaked that Bill.com is in talks to acquire Divvy for a rumored $2B+ (2/9)

This comes on the heels of @tryramp's news last month: @stripe made one of its biggest bets yet on Ramp, through an investment with VCs like @foundersfund, @redpointvc, @goldmansachs, D1, Coatue & @ThriveCapital that made us the fastest NY startup to reach a $1.6B valuation (3/9)

The opportunity to offer businesses a seamless way to pay for everything and to manage spend (read: spend less and smarter!) has been one of the largest untapped opportunities in fintech. We are doing everything we can to make running a high performing business easier. (4/9)

That is why we started @tryramp: no provider (old or new) was focused on helping companies spend less, while removing the need to create the painful artifacts (expense reports) of old technology. The industry clearly agrees the opportunity is massive and we love to see it. (5/9)

Payments innovators (like us) still only work with a small fraction of the total addressable market today. We believe we’re going to see a lot more investments, acquisitions, and growth in the space. (6/9)

For businesses, incumbents (e.g. Amex, Concur, Expensify) don’t make sense when you can use a modern platform for everything, and streamline the end to end workflows encountered when running a fast moving company. (7/9)

We think the first principles underlying the $BILL/Divvy acquisition are sound, but happen to believe that building cards, expense management, and broader B2B payments from scratch in one streamlined platform will be a smoother experience for customers over time. (8/9)

All of this is great news for employees and finance teams. New offerings (like ours) remove the need for expense reports to be created, and reduce operational complexity that wastes time and money. We are excited for what this means for companies and the industry's future. (9/9)