When Kimia Hamidi sold Buyer to Ramp in 2021, he was sitting alone in his garage. The garage was also his office. Confirmation arrived that the deal was done, and with it came two feelings that do not usually share billing in an acquisition announcement: excitement and nerves. He worried that joining a larger company would slow the work. He also worried about losing the status of being a founder.
That second concern is wonderfully candid. A company can have a price; a title tends to come with a private mythology. Hamidi had built something people wanted. Now he was agreeing to become part of somebody else's something. Looking back a year later, he described his anxiety with considerably less ceremony than a corporate communications department might prefer. Ramp, he said, had let the team accomplish more, faster.
The work itself survived the change of letterhead. Buyer helped companies discover whether their software bills were fair. Hamidi now runs NationGraph, which helps businesses understand government purchasing. The customer has changed, the documents have changed, and the size of the filing cabinet has grown rather dramatically. Across both businesses sits a recurring question: who knows something about a purchase that everybody else would benefit from knowing?
The price he had to phone a friend to find
Before Buyer, Hamidi built Ghostit, a content marketing business. His studies included economics and business at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia. His earlier entrepreneurial work dealt with the practical chore of maintaining a company's online presence: social posts, blogs, newsletters, and the machinery that keeps them coming. In an interview about Ghostit, he discussed using customers' problems to shape a product, and learning from the reviews competitors receive.
There is an instructive little scene in Ghostit's 2017 Product Hunt launch. Visitors liked the idea, but several could not find the prices. Hamidi explained that he had been testing whether removing prices would prompt more inquiries. The visitors were unimpressed. Small businesses wanted to assess the cost before entering a conversation. He agreed to put the prices back, listing plans beginning at $300, $500, and $950 a month.
It is a useful early appearance of a theme that would later become his business. Here was a future price-transparency founder receiving a brisk tutorial in price transparency. The exchange also shows something more ordinary and more revealing than a polished manifesto: he could explain an experiment, hear an objection, and change the page. Ghostit ranked first for the day on September 16, 2017. Its comment section was doing a little product management of its own.
While running his content business, Hamidi negotiated with vendors and called friends to ask what they were paying for particular tools. He later described those calls as the opening for Buyer. A founder checking a quote against a friend's bill is doing research with a very small sample and an unusually sociable database. Buyer would collect procurement information and use it to help other companies negotiate.
Hamidi credits Rich Barton, the founder behind Expedia, Zillow, and Glassdoor, as an influence. Barton's idea of making uncommon knowledge common resonated with him. Applied to software, it meant helping a buyer see beyond the offer sitting in front of them. A quotation could be judged against other transactions. Negotiation would begin with more than hope and a willingness to ask nicely.
An acquisition with the conversation reversed
Buyer began in 2020. By Hamidi's account, the business started gaining traction after six months of collecting data. Ramp approached with a proposed partnership: Buyer could sell Ramp to its customers. Hamidi replied that his team was busy and suggested Ramp sell Buyer to its customers instead. It is the sort of response that might end a conversation. This one helped redirect it toward an acquisition.
The offer arrived earlier in Buyer's life than Hamidi had anticipated. He asked himself whether joining Ramp would speed up the mission and expose him to people he could learn from. He concluded that it would. Eighteen months after starting Buyer, he sold it. The acquisition was announced alongside Ramp's $300 million Series C in August 2021. That figure was Ramp's financing round; it was not Buyer's sale price.
Ramp's plan joined Buyer's negotiation team with spending benchmarks drawn from millions of transactions. Hamidi became head of savings and led the negotiation product team. Under his leadership, Ramp launched an AI-powered Price Intelligence tool to help companies assess what they paid for software. His business had moved into a platform with a larger view of corporate spending, and a larger set of customers to serve.
“Joining Ramp will allow us to scale this vision.”
Kimia Hamidi, on the Buyer acquisition
His account of that period emphasizes what he learned from the people around him. Ramp changed his expectations of how a company should operate. He has credited Geoff Charles with demanding a high standard while treating people kindly. He also described an affinity with Frank Slootman's Amp It Up philosophy: urgency, a narrower focus, and a rising quality bar. Those are preferences he would carry into his next company.
The public record, privately difficult
NationGraph, founded in 2024, takes Hamidi into state, local, and education markets in the United States. He is its co-founder and CEO. Eden Ding, the co-founder and CTO, brings experience at Citadel and Google, including work with complex financial data. The pairing puts Hamidi's purchasing background alongside Ding's experience extracting useful information from large, messy collections of records.
The company's premise is easy to understand if you have ever tried to follow a decision through a public body's website. A budget may live in one place, a contract in another, and a discussion in a meeting packet or recorded session. NationGraph describes a market of more than 110,000 government institutions, each with its own processes and records. Being publicly available leaves plenty of room for being difficult to use.
Hamidi wants sellers to learn about needs before the formal request for proposals arrives. A contract's approaching expiry, a budget allocation, or a board's discussion can help a business decide whom to approach and when. That context matters to the people doing the buying, too. A vendor who understands the problem can have a more useful conversation than one arriving with a generic sales pitch and a heroic attachment.
The engineering work is correspondingly unromantic. Pipelines collect documents; machine-learning systems turn material into buying signals. Hamidi has introduced engineers Justin Bax and Luis Bariuan through a look at this process, which includes meeting minutes, purchase orders, budgets, RFPs, and recordings. Every tidy result depends on work done before anybody opens a search box. The records have to be gathered, understood, and connected to the right institution.
In February 2026, NationGraph announced an $18 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Perplexity's Fund, XYZ Venture Capital, and Reach Capital. Menlo's investors had first met Hamidi at Ramp. They recognized his interest in finding commercial value in information that was previously hard to access. For Hamidi, the new venture extends a question he had already spent years working on.
The founder who might fail his own interview
Hamidi's public remarks about recruiting come with a pleasingly inconvenient admission: he doubts he could pass his own company's interview process. Ding handles much of the recruiting. Hamidi describes a process designed to examine how candidates think and solve problems, particularly when the solution is unclear. He has written about Ding continuing through dozens of interviews without relaxing the standard simply to fill the role.
The cost is visible in a calendar crowded with appointments. Hamidi jokes about Ding's solid block of blue. Underneath the joke is an operational choice: accepting the work of searching for the right person. His enthusiasm for speed has a boundary here. Recruitment takes the time it takes, because the people hired will determine the quality of both the product and its conversations with customers.
Years earlier, discussing team culture, Hamidi compared leadership to editing. A leader checks whether the people and their interactions serve a shared mission. He described gathering a team's understanding of company values, writing those views down, and making room for regular conversations about tasks and difficulties. It is a practical account of culture, with meetings and documents attached. The poster on the wall would have to earn its keep.
A compass for the paperwork
By August 2026, NationGraph's product updates included Compass, an AI agent for researching accounts, finding contacts, preparing lists, and drafting outreach. Multi-step work is presented as a plan, with prepared results available for review. The release also described connections to Salesforce and HubSpot. In July, the company had added grant information to account views and contract-date filters to records-request workflows.
The details explain where Hamidi is trying to take the business. A salesperson should be able to move from a question about an agency to an informed next step, carrying the relevant contract and funding context along. The agent's usefulness depends on the material underneath it. The human conversation still needs a human who understands the buyer and has time to show up.
Hamidi's ambition now reaches beyond a cheaper software renewal. He argues that better access to government information can give vendors a fairer chance, public institutions better purchasing options, and taxpayers more value from the money being spent. That remains an ambition to be judged through the work. His route toward it is familiar: find the information people need, make it usable, and spare them another round of calls to discover what someone else already knows.