Procurify lands fresh cash to invest in AI-powered tools for procurement | TechCrunch


Roughly eight years ago, a little-known startup called Procurify raised $4 million for its platform that hosts tools to take some of the pain out of enterprise procurement.

The company never became buzzy, exactly. But Procurify grew steadily over the subsequent years, going on to raise $20 million in its Series B and today closing a $50 million Series C funding round led by Ten Coves Capital with participation from Export Development Canada, Canada’s export credit agency.

Procurify, which is based in Vancouver, Canada (hence the investment from the EDA), was co-founded by Aman Mann (the CEO), Eugene Dong (the CTO) and Kenneth Loi (the former CCO). The trio began working on the idea for the company in Dong’s parents’ basement after meeting in British Columbia Institute of Technology’s business management program in 2011.

“We recognized a gap in the procurement market for affordable, easy-to-use procurement software,” Mann told TechCrunch in an email interview. “In virtually every industry, organizations are struggling with a lack of real-time spend visibility and control.”

To Mann’s point, according to a recent Statista survey, hundreds of companies engaging in business-to-business procurement — i.e. finding, agreeing to terms and purchasing goods and services from a third party — admit to struggling with compliance processes, complex approval processes and purchasing systems and reconciling invoices in a timely manner.

So how does Procurify help? By consolidating various procurement steps in one place, mainly.

Procurify offers modules to manage purchasing, accounts payable (i.e. money owed to suppliers) and data analytics. Using the platform, customers can reallocate procurement spend and adjust forecasts, identify bottlenecks in “procure-to-pay” workflows and perform supplier analyses to inform future procurement decisions.

Procurify also leverages AI, detecting anomalies in purchase orders or invoices to flag them for review.

“In today’s post-pandemic economy, industries are grappling with layoffs, disrupted supply chains and rising operational costs,” Mann said. “The need for responsible spend controls and clear financial oversight is more pressing than ever.”

Procurify

Procurify’s product dashboard.

Procurify competes with incumbents (Coupa, SAP Ariba), enterprise resource management software with procurement management features (NetSuite) and upstarts (Precoro, Zip) in the over-$6.1 billion procurement software segment.

The startup appears to be doing well for itself, though, with a customer base of over 700 companies, a 100% year-over-year increase in sales and plans to invest heavily in bringing new AI capabilities to market.

“Procurify helps organizations bring more spend under management, thereby consolidating spend data from our customers’ procure-to-pay workflows to provide a complete picture of expenditures before they’re committed,” Mann said. “By harnessing the power of this comprehensive spend data and integrating it with AI models, enterprises could unearth opportunities for process optimization, manage risks and achieve cost efficiencies.”

Procurify, which has a team of just over 170 employees, has raised a total of $70 million in venture capital to date. In addition to AI R&D, Mann says that the proceeds from the Series C will be put toward general expansion and launching new payment features.



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