The $32 billion US spend management platform acquires a licensed payments provider to launch corporate cards and finance tools in the UK and EU this summer.

The corporate spend management market just shifted its centre of gravity. On 13 March 2026, Ramp, the New York-based financial operations platform valued at $32 billion, announced the acquisition of Billhop, a Stockholm and London payments firm licensed to operate across the European Economic Area and the UK.

The deal gives Ramp the regulatory infrastructure it needs to onboard European and British businesses directly, something it plans to begin doing this summer.

The timing is not subtle. In January, Capital One announced a $5.15 billion deal to acquire Brex, Ramp’s long-time US rival and once the defining name in startup corporate cards.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

That deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026. Ramp’s move into Europe lands while Brex is navigating an acquisition by a traditional bank, and while the question of what happens to Brex’s product roadmap and founder-friendly positioning under Capital One remains unanswered.

The acquisition of Billhop is primarily a licensing and infrastructure play. Billhop, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Stockholm, is a payments infrastructure provider that enables businesses to pay invoices by credit card, even to suppliers that do not ordinarily accept card payments.

It holds a Swedish Payment Institution licence from Finansinspektionen, Sweden’s financial regulator, and is separately authorised and regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority.

Those licences give Ramp what it could not quickly build itself: the regulatory standing to process payments across EEA member states and the UK as two distinct jurisdictions.

As part of the acquisition, Ramp will open its first international offices in London and Stockholm. The company currently serves nearly half its customers with some form of international payment capability, it supports transactions in over 180 countries and offers local currency cards in Canada, Australia, Japan, Mexico, and Singapore, but all of those customers are US-headquartered businesses.

The Billhop acquisition makes it possible, for the first time, to sign up companies based in the UK and EU as primary customers.

“We’ve spent years building Ramp into something the most ambitious US companies rely on. This summer, for the first time, companies headquartered in the UK and EU will be able to use Ramp directly. In their first year, the median Ramp customer saves 5% and grows revenue 16%. Europe is home to extraordinary companies. We can’t wait to get to work.”

That was Eric Glyman, Ramp’s co-founder and CEO, in the company’s announcement.

Niklas Bothén, CEO of Billhop,  who was appointed to the role in a planned leadership transition in late 2024, having joined the company as COO in 2020, framed the deal as a scale-up of Billhop’s core mission.

“Our mission at Billhop has always been to remove friction from B2B payments and make it easier for businesses to manage their spend. Joining Ramp allows us to realise that vision at a much larger scale.”

Ramp’s broader platform, which combines corporate cards, expense management, vendor payments, procurement, travel booking, and automated bookkeeping, processes over $100 billion in purchases annually and is used by more than 50,000 customers.

The company says its customers have collectively saved over $10 billion and 27.5 million hours since its founding in 2019. It raised a $312 million Series E round in November 2025, which brought its valuation to $32 billion.

The context for all of this is a market in transition. Brex, which was valued at $12.3 billion in 2022, agreed to sell to Capital One for $5.15 billion, less than half its peak valuation, in January 2026.

The markdown reflects a period in which Brex’s core customer base of venture-backed startups sharply reduced spending as funding dried up, while Ramp, with a broader customer mix and a stronger focus on cost savings and efficiency tools, continued to grow.

Ramp surpassed $1 billion in annualised recurring revenue in October 2025. Brex’s exit leaves Ramp as effectively the dominant independent spend management platform in the US market.

The European market Ramp is entering is materially different from the one it has built its US business on. Corporate card penetration in Europe is lower, B2B payment infrastructure is more fragmented across national markets, and the regulatory requirements for operating as a payment institution vary significantly by jurisdiction.

Billhop’s model, specifically designed to bridge the gap between card-paying buyers and non-card-accepting suppliers across European markets, addresses exactly the structural friction that has historically made it difficult for US-centric spend management platforms to gain traction in the region.

Financial terms of the Billhop acquisition were not disclosed. No acquisition price has been published by either party.

Microsoft has launched Copilot Health, a dedicated, secure space within its Copilot AI assistant that aggregates personal health data from wearables, electronic health records, and laboratory results, then applies AI to surface what the company calls a “coherent story” of a user’s health.

The product opened its waitlist on 12 March 2026 and is rolling out in phases, initially to English-speaking adults in the United States.

The launch marks Microsoft’s most direct entry into consumer health AI and places it alongside OpenAI, which introduced ChatGPT Health in January 2026, and Anthropic, which unveiled Claude for Healthcare the same month.

In the words of Dominic King, VP of Health at Microsoft AI: “2026 feels like an important year for consumer health.”

He told press briefing attendees that Microsoft’s consumer AI products, Copilot and Bing, already field more than 50 million health-related questions a day.

Copilot Health appears as a dedicated tab in the Copilot web interface and mobile app. Users create a health profile by entering basic details such as age and sex, then optionally connect data sources.

From there, the tool can analyse lab results, interpret wearable readings, surface connections across data streams, and help users prepare questions ahead of clinical appointments.

The data plumbing

Three connectors power the platform’s personal health layer. Wearable data, covering activity levels, sleep patterns, and vital signs, flows in from more than 50 devices, with Apple Health, Oura, and Fitbit cited as examples.

Electronic health records come through HealthEx, a US health data infrastructure provider whose network spans more than 52,000 healthcare organisations via direct FHIR-endpoint exchange, as well as TEFCA individual access services across more than 12,000 organisations. Lab results connect through Function, a venture-backed medical testing provider.

HealthEx confirmed the partnership in a separate press release issued on the same day. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Priyanka Agarwal, M.D., described the integration as giving users access to their health history “across labs, medications, conditions, clinical notes and more” with the ability to revoke access at any time.

Microsoft itself confirmed that users can disconnect any connector instantaneously and that health data in Copilot Health is not used for AI model training, a point the company has repeated prominently in all communications around the product.

For general health information, as opposed to personal data, Microsoft says it has elevated content from credible health organisations across 50 countries, with source selection verified by its clinical team using standards set by the National Academy of Medicine.

Responses include citations and source links. The platform also serves expert-written answer cards from Harvard Health and connects to real-time US provider directories, allowing users to search for clinicians by specialty, location, languages spoken, and insurance coverage.

The AI roadmap: towards ‘medical superintelligence’

Microsoft is framing Copilot Health as a step toward a longer-term goal it describes as “medical superintelligence”, a term the company has been using since at least late 2025. The vision is AI that can combine the breadth of a general physician with the depth of a specialist.

The vehicle most cited for this ambition is the Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO), a research-stage system the company says has produced strong results in clinical evaluation environments.

Microsoft says forthcoming publications will detail how MAI-DxO can be applied across a wider range of cases and conditions. The company states that any new AI features drawing on these research capabilities will only be released into Copilot Health after rigorous clinical evaluation and with clear labelling, a commitment that reads as a regulatory buffer as much as a product design principle.

“We truly believe we’re on the path to medical superintelligence that brings together both the wide-ranging knowledge of a family doctor or general physician as well as the deep domain expertise of a specialist,” said Dominic King, VP of Health, Microsoft AI.

Privacy, governance, and the HIPAA question

Microsoft has been careful on data governance. Copilot Health data and conversations are stored separately from general Copilot interactions, encrypted at rest and in transit, subject to stricter access controls, and not used for model training.

The product has achieved ISO/IEC 42001 certification, the international standard for AI management systems, which requires third-party verification of how an organisation builds, governs, and improves its AI services.

The platform has also been developed with an external advisory panel of more than 230 physicians from more than 24 countries, alongside consumer advocacy organisations including AARP, which serves 38 million older Americans, and the National Health Council, which represents over 180 patient advocacy groups.

However, a significant regulatory caveat emerged during press briefings. King confirmed that Copilot Health is not subject to HIPAA, the US federal law governing the privacy and security of patient health data,  because it operates as a direct-to-consumer service where users are sharing their own data, rather than as a covered healthcare entity.

King said: “HIPAA is not required for a direct-consumer experience like this when you’re using your own data,” while adding that Microsoft intends to announce updates on its HIPAA controls. He declined to specify what those updates would entail.

This distinction matters. HIPAA compliance obligates healthcare organisations to strict data handling, breach notification, and minimum necessary use standards.

Consumer health platforms that fall outside HIPAA, as Copilot Health does at launch, are not subject to the same enforcement regime. The FDA’s relaxation of rules around wearable clinical decision support at the start of 2026 adds further regulatory complexity: it means more AI-enabled health tools can reach consumers without pre-market FDA review.

The clinical reception

Initial expert reaction has been broadly cautious rather than hostile. Arjun Manrai, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, told Healthcare Brew that the approach makes strategic sense, describing the use of personal context in AI health interactions as likely to become a defining trend in 2026. He called helping people prepare for doctor’s appointments a good target for large language models.

Physicians interviewed by the New York Times acknowledged that AI-assisted health tools could help people access health information at a time when care is becoming increasingly expensive and clinicians increasingly stretched.

But the same physicians flagged concerns about privacy risks from sharing records with large technology companies, and the potential for tools like Copilot Health to prompt unnecessary clinical visits by making users anxious about data patterns that may be clinically insignificant.

Microsoft’s standard disclaimer sits at the bottom of every Copilot Health communication: the product is not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent diseases, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice.

The price of jet fuel has doubled since the Iran war began two weeks ago, as disruptions in vital shipping lanes limit the global trade of crude and refined oil. The airlines that run on it are racing to keep up. Jet fuel alone accounts for somewhere between 25 and 35 percent of airlines’ costs. The next stop is higher ticket prices.

It’s already happening, to some degree. Several airlines, including Air Asia and Hong Kong Airlines, have explicitly said they’re adding to their usual fuel surcharges. Domestic US ticket prices are up (though they were rising before the war too). “When [the oil price] goes up this rapidly, airfares go up,” United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told The Wall Street Journal this week. “They also come down, by the way, when fuel goes back down.”

Because no one has a crystal ball, what this all means for travelers is up in the air. Travel and airline industry experts say it’ll take several more weeks of conflict and high fuel prices to really begin reshaping the economics of travel—or to know, even, whether it’s happening. Airlines set initial schedules, routes, and ticket prices months out, which means the money they’re losing today to high costs might only be recouped through ticket sales for flights well into the future.

Here’s what’s likely going on behind the scenes at airlines that will decide whether high fuel prices translate into scrambled travel plans.

Travel vs. Leisure

For now, airlines are likely tinkering around the edges of operations and ticketing plans, says Ahmed Abdelghany, who studies airline operations as a professor in Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s College of Business. Some of these changes likely won’t be perceptible to the average flier. To make flights more fuel-efficient, for example, and less expensive to operate, airlines have likely already gotten careful about how much fuel is being carried on each flight, he says—less weight, less fuel burned. Upping ticket prices is an easier lift logistically for airlines, but not an automatic move.

“We say the airlines have three devils: volatility in fuel price, volatility in demand, and volatility in weather,” Abdelghany says. “For airlines to raise the fare, it’s not an easy decision, because it’s going to affect demand.”

In fact, many airlines could shield regular vacationers from the brunt of price spikes, initially, because they believe some demand will stick around despite high fares. Since the disruptions that came with the Covid-19 pandemic, several major airlines have rejiggered their business models to focus on business fliers, who tend to be less price-sensitive as they travel on the company dime. “There’s more focus on premium travelers and increased upselling, as opposed to a model that was more domestically focused and had a larger share of business from the main cabin,” says Jarrett Bilous, the managing director for transportation, aerospace, and defense at S&P Global Ratings. Airlines could choose to pass on higher prices to spendier passengers first.

The tickets less affected by price hikes in the shorter term, then, might be the ones more likely to have leisure travelers aboard: trips that start and end on weekends, or last two weeks instead of a handful of days (which reads “business trip”).

But there’s no guarantee that airlines will stick to that strategy if the high fuel prices drag on, Bilous says. The newer theories about sustainable business traveler demand haven’t been tested during a real financial squeeze. “We really haven’t had either a sustained demand downturn or a price shock in quite some time,” he says.

A New World

If the jet-fuel price shock continues for weeks or even months, bigger changes—and inconveniences—might be headed to an airline near you. Airlines might cut their schedules, targeting less profitable routes to start. (They could also nix flights that pass through the unsettled airspace around the ever-widening conflict.)

During the last major and sustained fuel shock in 2008, airlines charged for checked and eventually carry-on bags. Though the aviation business has changed since then, it’s possible airlines could once again start experimenting with new ways to make extra money off fliers. “New ancillary revenues, fees, charges, maybe lowering the maximum weight of check-in bags—it’s possible,” Abdelghany says. But these sorts of new systems would take a while to implement.

Bilous, the analyst, stopped short of offering ticket-buying advice. “The risk of higher prices has certainly grown versus a few weeks ago,” he says. “Just how much higher, if at all, they go, it remains to be seen.”

Ever spent ages trying to curl or smooth your hair only to end up juggling multiple hot tools, wishing one device could dry, style, and shape everything in one go?

Then we can help you out, as the Dyson Airwrap i.d multi-styler and Dryer straight+wavy is now £399, down from its usual £479.99 retail price.

That brings one of Dyson’s most advanced hair styling tools back to a rare Black Friday-level saving during this Amazon Spring Deal Days sale.

Dyson Airwrap i.d hits Black Friday big saving again

The Dyson Airwrap i.d has scored another hefty Black Friday discount, putting this sought‑after styler firmly back in the spotlight.

Advertisement

View Deal

The Dyson Airwrap i.d is designed to replace several separate styling tools, using Dyson’s signature Airwrap technology to style hair while it dries rather than relying on extreme heat.

Instead of clamping or pressing hair between heated plates, the device uses high-velocity airflow to attract and wrap strands around its barrels, which helps shape curls and waves while reducing the heat damage common with traditional styling tools.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Powered by a 1300W motor, the tool delivers strong airflow that helps dry hair quickly while still giving users control through three speed settings and three heat levels for adjusting the styling process.

That flexibility becomes especially useful for people with longer hair, as the device is specifically designed for chest-length or longer styles and can handle thicker sections without constant repositioning or repeated passes.

Get Updates Straight to Your WhatsApp

Join Now

Where the Dyson Airwrap i.d really earns its reputation is in the number of styling options it offers without needing separate appliances scattered across your bathroom counter.

Advertisement

Included attachments such as the concentrator, diffuser, and brush heads, allow the device to move from rough drying to smoothing or shaping depending on the look you want that day.

The Dyson Airwrap i.d multi-styler and Dryer straight+wavy also makes everyday styling less complicated because switching attachments takes seconds, meaning you can transition from drying to curling without stopping to reach for another tool.

Advertisement

At £399, the Dyson Airwrap i.d remains a premium styling device, but this discount brings the price closer to what many people would normally spend on several separate hair tools combined.

Advertisement

SQUIRREL_PLAYLIST_10148964