Ramp, a finance automation company, has made an exclusive announcement to TechCrunch that it has acquired Cohere.io, a startup specializing in AI-powered customer support tools. Cohere.io, based in New York, raised $3.1 million in seed funding from investors such as Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, and BoxGroup.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. This marks Ramp’s first acquisition since purchasing negotiation platform Buyer in 2021 and its second since its establishment in 2019.
Cohere.io was founded in 2020 by Yunyu Lin, Jason Wang, and Rahul Sengottuvelu, who initially met at Duke University. Lin had previously worked for Ramp before leaving to co-found Cohere.io, while the other two co-founders graduated during the pandemic.
Now, Lin, Sengottuvelu, and three other engineers have rejoined Ramp to work on AI-related projects that aim to solve problems for Ramp customers in innovative and efficient ways. The acquisition also includes one salesperson from Cohere.io joining the Ramp team.
Initially focused on improving remote desktop and screen-sharing experiences, Cohere.io later shifted its focus to LLM-powered support automation. Using generative AI and large language models, Cohere.io extracted customer support data to automate responses and resolve up to 60% of tickets.
As part of the acquisition, Ramp plans to adapt Cohere.io’s automation product to help its customers automate workflows and gain better insights into their spend data.
Although Cohere.io did not disclose exact revenue figures, the company reported 150% year-over-year revenue growth and over 200 customers at the time of the acquisition. Notable clients included Rippling, Loom, and SecureFrame. Ramp, on the other hand, boasts more than 15,000 customers. Ramp CEO Eric Glyman highlighted Cohere.io’s unique approach, which distinguishes it from other chatbot solutions in the market by automatically generating content for even infrequent and complex questions.
The collaboration between Ramp and Cohere.io aims to further automate workflows and enhance Ramp’s ability to analyze large sets of structured and unstructured data. This will help Ramp’s customers optimize their software purchases and ensure they receive the best prices.
Additionally, Ramp plans to use Cohere.io’s technology to extract relevant details from contracts, invoices, and receipts to provide its customers with fair pricing intelligence.
While Cohere.io attracted interest from other players in the market, the founders believed that the value of generative AI would be maximized by companies with access to customer data, making Ramp an ideal partner. The founders were impressed by Ramp’s rapid growth and technical expertise, as they noticed a significant improvement in automated ticket responses once they started using Cohere.io’s technology.
The acquisition of Cohere.io by Ramp represents a strategic move to enhance customer support capabilities through AI-powered automation. By leveraging Cohere.io’s expertise and technology, Ramp aims to provide its customers with more efficient workflows, improved self-service systems, and enhanced insights into their spend data.
