Rep. Gerald Connolly, rating member of the U.S. House Oversight Committee, has initiated an investigation into whether or not expense administration startup Ramp is receiving preferential remedy in its bid for a $25 million authorities contract.
Connolly despatched a letter to General Services Administration (GSA) Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian demanding info and paperwork associated to the GSA’s reported plans to award a contract for a pilot program to Ramp. News of the probe was first reported by ProPublica.
Among Connolly’s largest considerations are that Ramp allegedly has “zero federal contracting expertise” and its buyers embrace plenty of Trump allies and supporters. Those buyers embrace Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital (based by Josh Kushner, brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared), vocal Trump supporter 8VC’s Joe Lonsdale, and Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and brother of former Republican President George W. Bush. Rabois, in response to Connolly’s letter, raised greater than $1 million for Donald Trump’s 2024 marketing campaign.
Connolly is requesting a number of issues from the GSA, together with an in depth record of all conferences between any GSA official and any Ramp consultant, and all communications between any GSA official, contractor, or subcontractor and any Ramp consultant.
The authorities’s inner expense card program, dubbed SmartPay, is a $700 billion program. Currently, Citibank and US Bank, two of the nation’s largest suppliers of bank cards, are the official banks of the present SmartPay contract.
In April, Ramp’s head of communications, Lindsay McKinley, confirmed to TechCrunch that the startup was “competing in a typical procurement course of for a SmartPay pilot program based mostly on the energy of our answer.”
She claimed that the startup Ramp noticed a public submit on X shared by the Department of Government Efficiency, higher often known as DOGE, on February 18 that stated “the US authorities at present has ~4.6M lively bank cards/accounts, which processed ~90M distinctive transactions for ~$40B of spend in FY24.”
A former buyer, Ramp claims, launched Ramp to GSA just a few days later.
However, Connolly alleges that Ramp reportedly started contacting entities within the fee trade about particular financial institution identification numbers required to course of authorities funds earlier than a request for info (RFI) associated to the contract was publicly introduced.
He additionally claimed {that a} GSA worker just lately said that Ramp was the “favourite” to win this enterprise.
Ramp didn’t have any touch upon Connolly’s investigation.
In March, Ramp doubled its valuation to $13 billion after a $150 million secondary share sale. Since its inception in 2019, the startup has raised over $1 billion in fairness financing and $700 million in dedicated debt funding.
