Spend management platform Ramp Inc. is enlisting artificial intelligence agents to help eliminate a growing problem for corporate customers: invoice fraud.

Invoice fraud has been spreading with the help of readily available generative AI tools that make fabricating documents easier. It’s a simple and effective scheme: bad actors generate a false invoice designed to look like it’s from a legitimate vendor and send it to a business. If the victim takes the bait, they end up depositing money directly into the fraudster’s bank account.

“It will be a continuous arms race,” Karim Atiyeh, co-founder and chief technology officer of the financial technology firm, said as he noted that fraudsters are increasingly using AI to attack clients. “We just have to stay ahead of the curve.”

Founders Fund-backed Ramp is competing closely against tech-forward peers including payments giant Stripe Inc., which offers its own bill pay product that leverages AI and its network of customer data to spot fraud.

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Ramp’s accounts payable agents flagged $1 million worth of fraudulent invoices across the tens of customers piloting the product over a 90 day period, according to a Ramp spokesperson. In all of those cases, the invoices went unpaid after a human confirmed they weren’t legitimate.

In one case, a blockchain company with roughly 1,000 vendors caught a fraudulent invoice for about $50,000, the spokesperson said. The average loss from an invoice fraud incident in the US is $133,000, according to a 2024 survey of senior finance executives by accounts payable firm Medius.

The agents help catch fraudulent invoices by evaluating 63 pieces of data including payment history, email address on the invoice and vendor details. Ramp agents can also look across the data from all of its 45,000 clients to validate whether the invoice is coming from a known vendor and check that their account details match-up.

Ramp is investing heavily in AI agents designed to autonomously manage tasks on behalf of their clients following two recent mega funding rounds. In July, the company announced it had raised $500 million at a $22.5 billion valuation just 45 days after its previous round valuing it at $16 billion. The same month, Ramp rolled out its first set of agents designed to determine whether employee expenses are in or out of policy.

Read more: Ramp Investors Add Funding as Company Expands, Plans AI Agents

In addition to the fraud piece, the agents aim to automate tasks like confirming bank account numbers or coding the invoices to the proper expense category.  “You look at places where a lot of time is being wasted, accounts payable is a very clear piece of that,” Ramp’s Atiyeh said.

–By Emily Mason (Bloomberg)