Krishnan Chandra

principal eng @tryramp | prev co-founder/CTO @SixHQAI and @RsrchRabbit 👨🏾‍💻 @confluentinc @Reddit @siebelschool

[Ramp @tryramp]

Our first launch geared specifically to support accountants is live, but how did Stack get built?

In this episode of Ramptables, Victor Pires spoke with Mike Liu, Krishnan Chandra, and Graeme Mounsey on what went into building the AI operating system for today's top accounting firms.

[Ramp @tryramp]

Most software is built for accounting teams.

Stack is built with them.

[Ian Macomber @iandmacomber]

The lesson we've learned time and time again while building agentic products: there's no substitute for deeply, deeply understanding the job.

Great read from @ryanlstevens12 and team about how they built Ramp Stack. Before the team wrote a single line of harness code, they talked to accountants, drew out the actual workflows, added every decision point, edge case, and judgement call where two smart humans would disagree or do something differently. That set of evals became our benchmark.

Agents are unreasonably effective when you give them a verifiable goal. The benchmark comes through understanding the job. Understanding the job comes from watching accountants work.

With this foundation, we built and rebuilt our harness. We learned that 2/3rds of skills were actually hurting performance. We identified where we were overfitting on period-specific data points. Our benchmark lets us compound 1% improvements on decisions that would otherwise have been vibes-based.

Month end close will never be the same 🚀🚀🚀

https://t.co/1lrqCVYYvK

[Diego Zaks @diegozaks]

Building and launching this product took hundreds of hours of research, co-building with customers, and renting a robot arm.

[Krishnan Chandra @krishnanc_]

We launched a thing! Extremely proud of the Stack team for all the hard work to get us here, and for all the improvements yet to come.

[Eric Glyman @eglyman]

Introducing Stack.

The AI operating system that lets accounting firms take on more clients without hiring. Learns your firm's process, runs the close, posts the journals. Fully auditable.

We’re living through the biggest shift in accounting since the spreadsheet.

[i2cjak @i2cjak]

breaking: recruiter in your LinkedIn DMs offering half your current salary + 5 days in office

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

Heartbroken by the shooting today at the Islamic Center of San Diego.

There should be no hesitation for anyone to condemn anti-Muslim hate.

Praying for all those affected by this tragedy today.

[Krishnan Chandra @krishnanc_]

@mathemagic1an @larsencc @madhavjha Indeed, it’s substantially higher

[Ian Tracey @ian_dot_so]

Despite the popular narrative:

I believe teams will have to become more technical with AI, not less.

[Mj✡︎ @motivatedjoy]

Fuck every single one of you in Toronto who remains silent about this. I’ve been running a little low on non-Jewish friends lately, and this is one of the main reasons why.

[litquidity @litcapital]

Private credit credit default swaps

[Samo Burja @SamoBurja]

I wish we lived in a more peaceful world.

[Krishnan Chandra @krishnanc_]

@AlexNoonan6 Counterpoint: having no editor kills the value of a GUI and I typically just use Codex CLI instead

[Krishnan Chandra @krishnanc_]

@SaaiArora @tryramp Most of it is just this, but I definitely appreciate the multiplayer mode as well - ex: you can make a frontend change and then hand off the session to PM/designer to fix copy if needed

[SHEHU® @DevShehu]

@SaaiArora @tryramp yah. it also has secure access to disperate data sources like GitHub, databases, datadog, slack, https://t.co/VEHpUf9a4D, figma etc so it can pull whatever context it needs to solve a task

[Eric Glyman @eglyman]

There are two non-negotiables in accounting: the books must be correct, and they must be ready on time.

For decades, companies have satisfied those constraints through an extraordinary amount of manual effort. Highly trained professionals code transactions, re-approve familiar expenses, reconcile mismatches after the fact, and compress all of it into the ritual of month-end close.

It works. But it is fundamentally retrospective.

Today, @tryramp is introducing an Accounting Agent designed around a different premise: what if bookkeeping happened as the business operated, rather than after it?

The agent captures, codes, reviews, validates, accrues, and reconciles spend continuously. It learns directly from the people who understand the nuances best, the accounting team itself, and applies that context in real time.

At @perplexity_ai, where velocity is part of the company’s identity, this has allowed their team to stop choosing between speed and accuracy. The majority of transactions are now coded automatically while remaining audit-ready, enabling close to start on day one instead of day thirty.

What’s been most striking is how the system learns the subtle, company-specific logic that historically lived only in human judgment. As Jim Romano, CFO at @statesidevodka, described it, the agent is already identifying patterns like when spend belongs in samples rather than travel and entertainment — the kinds of decisions that typically require institutional memory. As he put it, the goal is simple: finance teams should focus on exceptions, not the easy stuff.

We’re also seeing the second-order effects emerge quickly. Teams report spending dramatically less time reviewing transactions and substantially more time on planning, analysis, and growth. As one CFO told us, “What used to take hours of manual review now happens automatically. I’m spending nearly all of my time thinking about where the business should go, not retracing where it’s already been.”

There is a broader shift underway in accounting. The central question is moving from “what parts of close can be automated?” to “should close even be a discrete event at all?”

One belief that increasingly guides our work at Ramp is that information latency inside companies is an invisible tax. When financial truth lags behind operational reality, organizations make slower and often worse decisions. As transaction data becomes inherently digital and systems become capable of learning institutional context, continuous close stops being aspirational and starts becoming inevitable.

One thing that surprised us while building this: accounting isn’t constrained by a lack of rules — it’s constrained by how many of those rules are unwritten. Much of financial operations lives in patterns that experienced teams simply know. Seeing software begin to absorb and apply that tacit knowledge has been one of the clearest signals that accounting is entering a new phase.

Accounting has always been the record for business reality. Our goal is to help it become something closer to real-time truth.

Proud of the team, and grateful to the customers building this alongside us.

[Ramp Labs @RampLabs]

We built Anthropic's internal revenue model based on the latest reports.

$4.5B → $148B in 5 years
$100B in training costs
Profitable two years before OpenAI

[Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal]

The most important quality for a smart person is courage because without it their intellect will be leveraged to rationalize their fears and concoct the most convincing excuses not to act.

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

the overton window for elected officials now includes hijacking a plane to commit suicide as long as it’s “based”

the future of both parties is this kind of downwardly mobile wahhabism where political victories are only optics, never material, and come only by singular violence

[Cristina Cordova @cjc]

This is indefensible. The victim’s legally owned handgun was removed from the scene, and then ICE agents shot him multiple times. It’s far from law enforcement — it’s just murder.

Those who defend this don’t care about law or order. It’s about money, power, and protecting an executive branch that’s already been bought and paid for.