There are two kinds of business card, and the marketing for both uses the same words. One kind underwrites your company. The other kind underwrites you. Which one you can get has almost nothing to do with how good your startup is and almost everything to do with how much cash is sitting in your business account this week.
Ramp underwrites the business. Amex and Chase underwrite the founder. That single split explains most of the decision, and it is why founders who ask "which card has the best rewards" are usually asking the wrong question first.
The short version
- Ramp needs about $25,000 in a US business bank account and gives you no personal guarantee and no personal credit check in return.
- Amex and Chase business cards will approve a company with zero revenue if your personal credit is good, because you are the one on the hook.
- Ramp is a charge card: the balance is due in full every statement period. It does not finance anything.
- Amex and Chase business cards revolve, which is genuinely useful in a bad month and genuinely expensive if it becomes a habit.
- Sole proprietors cannot get a Ramp card at all. The entity has to be a corporation, LLC, LP or nonprofit.
The personal guarantee is the real product difference
A personal guarantee means that if the company cannot pay the card, you personally can be pursued for the balance. Both Amex and Chase require one on their small business cards. That is not a hidden gotcha, it is the entire reason they can approve a company with no operating history: they are lending against your personal credit file, which does have a history.
Ramp does the opposite. It evaluates business financials, runs no personal credit check, and asks for no guarantee. To make that math work it needs to see the money. The commonly cited threshold is roughly $25,000 in a US business bank account, and the limit it extends tracks your real-time balance rather than a fixed line set once at approval.
That produces a specific, slightly awkward outcome. A founder with an 800 personal FICO and $4,000 in the company account gets approved by Chase and declined by Ramp. A founder with a thin personal file and $600,000 of seed money in Mercury gets the reverse. Neither answer is about the quality of the business.
| Ramp | Amex Business | Chase Ink | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Underwrites | The business balance | Your personal credit | Your personal credit |
| Personal guarantee | No | Yes | Yes |
| Personal credit check | No | Yes | Yes |
| Rough entry requirement | ~$25,000 in a business account | Good personal FICO | Good personal FICO |
| Card type | Charge, paid in full each period | Mix of charge and revolving | Revolving |
| Sole proprietors | Not eligible | Eligible | Eligible |
| Base rewards | Up to 1.5% flat, varies by profile | 1% to 2% on the no-fee cash cards | 1.5% flat on Ink Unlimited, up to 5% in categories |
Rewards rates and card lineups move constantly. The figures above were checked on 2026-08-10 and the exact card names change more often than the structure does, so treat the last row as the least durable line in the table.
When Ramp is the right answer
Ramp fits once you have raised or earned enough that the cash requirement is not a question, and once more than one person is spending money.
The reason is not the cashback. Up to 1.5% flat, with the actual rate depending on your company's financial profile, is competitive but not remarkable. The reason is that spend controls and accounting data come in the same box. You issue a virtual card per vendor with a hard monthly cap, so the AWS card cannot buy furniture and a compromised card number cannot be used for more than its limit. Merchant, category and receipt data flow into your accounting system as structured fields.
That last part is worth more than the rewards for most startups, and almost nobody prices it. A card that emits clean structured data means most transactions arrive already categorized. A card that emits a description string means a person sits down every month and matches receipts by hand. If your books are chronically two weeks behind, look at your card feed before you blame your bookkeeper.
The constraint to plan around is that a charge card does not carry a balance. If your business has genuinely lumpy cash, where a large receivable lands three weeks after a large payable, a card that demands payment in full each cycle is a worse fit than it looks in the demo.
When Amex or Chase is the right answer
Three situations, and the first one is the most common.
You do not have $25,000 yet. A pre-seed company with $9,000 in the bank and a founder with good personal credit can get a Chase Ink or an Amex Blue Business card approved this afternoon. It is the only real option at that stage, and the personal guarantee is the price of the ticket. Take it, use it deliberately, and revisit once you raise.
You need a card that revolves. Consulting and agency businesses with 60-day client payment terms sometimes need to float a month. A revolving business credit card does that at a stated APR. It is expensive money, but it is available money, and it is cheaper than missing payroll.
You want the category multipliers. Chase Ink pays up to 5% in specific categories and Amex has its own structure. If a large share of your spend is concentrated where the multipliers are, the effective rate can beat a flat 1.5%. Do that arithmetic on your actual last six months of spend, not on the marketing page, because most startup spend is cloud infrastructure and payroll, and neither is usually a bonus category.
The cost is that these cards are built for a business owner, not a finance team. Employee cards exist but the controls are blunter, and the accounting export is generally a CSV rather than a structured feed.
The setup most startups actually land on
Two cards, and it is a deliberate choice rather than a mess.
A no-personal-guarantee corporate card carries the recurring, controllable spend: cloud, SaaS subscriptions, ad platforms, team expenses. Each vendor gets its own virtual card with a cap that matches the contract, so an unexpected usage spike gets declined instead of discovered at month end.
A personally guaranteed card sits behind it for two jobs. Some vendors reject virtual card numbers or the corporate card BIN outright, particularly older enterprise billing systems and some international suppliers. And in a bad month, having a card that can revolve is a real option to have and not use.
Take one founder running a seed-stage analytics company. Ad spend on the corporate card sat at a $12,000 monthly cap. A campaign misconfiguration tried to spend $40,000 in four days. The card declined at the cap, someone got a notification, and the damage was $12,000 instead of $40,000. No amount of cashback would have covered the difference. That is what the control layer is for.
What none of these cards do for your books
A card gives you a feed. It does not give you a ledger.
Even the cleanest corporate card export arrives as transactions with a merchant, an amount and a category guess. Somebody still has to decide whether a $2,400 charge is prepaid software to amortize across twelve months or an expense in the month it hit, whether the conference charge is marketing or travel, and which class or department carries it. Get that wrong consistently and your gross margin is fiction, which matters the first time an investor asks you to defend it.
Median connects Ramp, Brex, Stripe, Mercury and the bank feeds directly, categorizes and posts the activity every business day, and a real accountant reviews the exceptions. The card decision above changes how clean the raw feed is. It does not change the fact that someone has to own what the numbers mean.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Ramp card require a personal guarantee? No. Ramp underwrites the business rather than the founder, so there is no personal credit check and no personal guarantee. The tradeoff is the cash requirement: roughly $25,000 in a US business bank account, with the limit moving against your real balance.
Is Ramp a credit card or a charge card? A charge card. The balance is due in full each statement period rather than revolving, so it is a payment and control tool rather than a financing tool.
Can a pre-revenue startup with no credit history get a business card? Yes, but usually one that leans on your personal credit. Amex and Chase underwrite the owner's personal FICO, so a founder with good personal credit can be approved with no business history at all.
Do I need more than one business card? Most startups end up with two. One corporate card for controlled day-to-day spend, one personally guaranteed card for vendors that reject it and for the month where carrying a balance beats missing payroll.
Does the choice of card affect bookkeeping? More than founders expect. A corporate card platform pushes structured merchant and receipt data into accounting automatically. A bank rewards card usually sends a description string and an amount, which means manual matching every month.
What to do this week
- Check your business bank balance against the $25,000 line. That one number tells you which half of this article applies to you.
- Pull your last six months of card spend and total it by category. If less than a third sits in bonus categories, a flat 1.5% beats a multiplier card and you can stop comparing rewards.
- Whichever card you carry, set a per-vendor cap on every recurring charge. The declines you never see are the point.
- Connect the card to your accounting system before the next statement closes, not after. Backfilling three months of receipts is the worst afternoon in startup finance.
If the card feed is clean and the books are still behind, the card was never the problem. See how Median keeps books current from the feeds you already have.