Welcome to my weekly fintech-focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it officially turns into a newsletter on May 1, sign up here.

On March 25, PitchBook released its 2021 Annual Fintech Report, which found that the fintech industry raised $121.6 billion last year -- up 153% year-over-year in terms of global VC deal value. Alex and I will be doing a deep dive on that report next week, but it's a nice lead-in to what I'm examining today.

There has been much talk as of late of a slowdown in venture funding. But if this past week’s mega-rounds in fintech are any indication, the sector is proving it has the potential to be quite the outlier – at least for now.

In what was not a surprise but is still noteworthy, corporate spend and expense management startup Ramp confirmed that it raised $200 million in equity, secured $550 million in debt and doubled its valuation to $8.1 billion. Not bad for a company that only publicly launched just over two years ago.

I also exclusively covered Jeeves’ $180 million Series C, which quadrupled that company’s valuation to $2.1 billion in half a year’s time. I’ve been writing about Jeeves since it came out of stealth last June with $31 million in equity and it’s been wild watching it grow. It also operates in the corporate spend and expense management space, with more of a global footprint and infrastructure component. In fact, it describes itself as the first “cross country, cross currency” expense management platform. Jeeves has a presence in, and is seeking to expand in, Latin America, Canada and Europe. It’s also eyeing Southeast Asia and potentially Saudi Arabia and Africa.

Another thing that both Ramp and Jeeves have in common -- besides skyrocketing valuations -- is that both companies are experiencing hyper-growth. Unfortunately, as with most private companies, neither startup will share hard revenue figures. But they do at least provide some metrics. Ramp says its revenue grew "early 10x" in 2021 compared to 2020 while its cardholder base grew 7x and its user base grew 15x. CEO Eric Glyman also tells us that Ramp is powering over $5 billion in annualized payments volume. Considering it makes money off of each transaction, it’s safe to say that Ramp is well, ramping up into impressive revenue territory. Meanwhile, Jeeves says it has seen its revenue grow by 900% since its September raise and even more impressively, that in the first two months of 2022, it brought in more revenue than all of 2021. Meanwhile, the startup has doubled its client base to more than 3,000 companies and reached about $1.3 billion in annualized gross transaction volume (GTV).