The $32 billion US spend management platform acquires a licensed payments provider to launch corporate cards and finance tools in the UK and EU this summer.

The corporate spend management market just shifted its centre of gravity. On 13 March 2026, Ramp, the New York-based financial operations platform valued at $32 billion, announced the acquisition of Billhop, a Stockholm and London payments firm licensed to operate across the European Economic Area and the UK.

The deal gives Ramp the regulatory infrastructure it needs to onboard European and British businesses directly, something it plans to begin doing this summer.

The timing is not subtle. In January, Capital One announced a $5.15 billion deal to acquire Brex, Ramp’s long-time US rival and once the defining name in startup corporate cards.

That deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026. Ramp’s move into Europe lands while Brex is navigating an acquisition by a traditional bank, and while the question of what happens to Brex’s product roadmap and founder-friendly positioning under Capital One remains unanswered.

The acquisition of Billhop is primarily a licensing and infrastructure play. Billhop, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Stockholm, is a payments infrastructure provider that enables businesses to pay invoices by credit card, even to suppliers that do not ordinarily accept card payments.

It holds a Swedish Payment Institution licence from Finansinspektionen, Sweden’s financial regulator, and is separately authorised and regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority.

Those licences give Ramp what it could not quickly build itself: the regulatory standing to process payments across EEA member states and the UK as two distinct jurisdictions.

As part of the acquisition, Ramp will open its first international offices in London and Stockholm. The company currently serves nearly half its customers with some form of international payment capability, it supports transactions in over 180 countries and offers local currency cards in Canada, Australia, Japan, Mexico, and Singapore, but all of those customers are US-headquartered businesses.

The Billhop acquisition makes it possible, for the first time, to sign up companies based in the UK and EU as primary customers.

“We’ve spent years building Ramp into something the most ambitious US companies rely on. This summer, for the first time, companies headquartered in the UK and EU will be able to use Ramp directly. 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.”

That was Eric Glyman, Ramp’s co-founder and CEO, in the company’s announcement.

Niklas Bothén, CEO of Billhop,  who was appointed to the role in a planned leadership transition in late 2024, having joined the company as COO in 2020, framed the deal as a scale-up of Billhop’s core mission.

“Our mission at Billhop has always been to remove friction from B2B payments and make it easier for businesses to manage their spend. Joining Ramp allows us to realise that vision at a much larger scale.”

Ramp’s broader platform, which combines corporate cards, expense management, vendor payments, procurement, travel booking, and automated bookkeeping, processes over $100 billion in purchases annually and is used by more than 50,000 customers.

The company says its customers have collectively saved over $10 billion and 27.5 million hours since its founding in 2019. It raised a $312 million Series E round in November 2025, which brought its valuation to $32 billion.

The context for all of this is a market in transition. Brex, which was valued at $12.3 billion in 2022, agreed to sell to Capital One for $5.15 billion, less than half its peak valuation, in January 2026.

The markdown reflects a period in which Brex’s core customer base of venture-backed startups sharply reduced spending as funding dried up, while Ramp, with a broader customer mix and a stronger focus on cost savings and efficiency tools, continued to grow.

Ramp surpassed $1 billion in annualised recurring revenue in October 2025. Brex’s exit leaves Ramp as effectively the dominant independent spend management platform in the US market.

The European market Ramp is entering is materially different from the one it has built its US business on. Corporate card penetration in Europe is lower, B2B payment infrastructure is more fragmented across national markets, and the regulatory requirements for operating as a payment institution vary significantly by jurisdiction.

Billhop’s model, specifically designed to bridge the gap between card-paying buyers and non-card-accepting suppliers across European markets, addresses exactly the structural friction that has historically made it difficult for US-centric spend management platforms to gain traction in the region.

Financial terms of the Billhop acquisition were not disclosed. No acquisition price has been published by either party.