Ramp secures $5m for game-changing forecasts

Ramp, a global decision science start-up with its head office in the United Kingdom, has closed a $5 million seed funding round. The company was founded in 2018 to provide an alternative to the vast majority of businesses that continue to use spreadsheets for financial modelling.

Ramp’s platform can predict customer behaviour, future revenue, and the annual growth of a firm in real-time. Chief executive Dan Marcus said, “The majority of quarterly target misses are not due to company performance, but rather to the quality of the forecast itself. In other words, it is factors that could have been predicted at the time that are being missed.”

The platform has already been successful in working with a range of gaming companies, including Space Ape Games, FRVR, Pixel United, and Netspeak Games. The new funding will be used to streamline the onboarding process for new clients.

The unique selling point of Ramp’s forecasting platform is the use of cohort-based forecasting.

This enables the system to extrapolate the behaviour of different groups of customers from the moment they sign up.

The platform uses multiple dynamically-selected statistical models for different cohorts in any forecast. It also uses an opinionated view to model the interactions between the different levers of a business, with additional models to optimise inputs such as seasonality and live operations. This enables Ramp to dramatically increase the accuracy of revenue forecasting, reducing the time taken from weeks or months to mere minutes.

The seed funding round was led by AlbionVC, and Eurazeo also participated. Investment director at AlbionVC, Paul Lehair, commented: “As an ex-CFO of a B2C startup, I am blown away by Ramp’s unique approach to solving the business-critical problem that is forecasting. We are thrilled to back the team and their ambition to create a new category leader in this space.”

Tara Reeves, managing director for Venture at Eurazeo, said: “I believe its product will be of great value for teams in product, finance, and marketing, and we are excited to support the team in its mission to become a leader in this field.”

Ramp’s long-term goal is to be seen as a single source of truth for businesses, providing prescriptive and proactive analytics services. Co-founder and COO, Jan Pickard, added that the company’s previous experience in scaling businesses has provided a strong foundation for the future.

“We are building Ramp for the long-term, and we will continue to make strategic investments in our technology, people, and partnerships to help us achieve our goal of being the best cohort-based forecasting platform in the world,” said Pickard.

The company is based in the United Kingdom and also has offices in South Africa.  Nearly 80% of Ramp’s staff are based in Cape Town, as are three of the start-up’s four founders.

READ NEXT: Fez Delivery raises $1m to revolutionise delivery in Nigeria