CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up returns today, in this first edition for 2020, with fresh supply management technology news and updates from the past month. If you are a sourcing, procurement, or spend management solution provider and you are continually innovating the way that procurement and supply chain leaders and practitioners drive value, we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a note at editor at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!
Scoutbee Receives $60 million in Series B Funding
Last week, Germany-based Scoutbee, which provides intelligent strategic sourcing and supplier discovery solutions for procurement teams, informed us that it has raised $60 million in Series B funding from venture capital firms Atomico, Lakestar, and Next47. This is the third investment that Scoutbee has received in the last 12 months, totaling $76 million from venture capital firms. With this latest funding round, Scoutbee intends to further develop its platform, increase its customer base, and expand its staff from 120 to approximately 220 by year’s end. Hiro Tamura, Partner at Atomico, will also join the Board of Directors at scoutbee.
Scoutbee’s SaaS-based strategic sourcing platform, Streamline, leverages an artificial intelligence (AI) engine, ARTIMIS, to mine, centralize, and scan supplier and product data across markets and languages. Streamline also pulls data from DeapSee, a collection of customer-specific data lakes “fed” by external and third-party data (like Dun & Bradstreet) that is updated in real time. Armed with this data and insight, sourcing managers can conduct a sourcing event from RFI to RFP on the Streamline platform.
Zycus Launches New AI-driven Bot for Contract Management
Zycus, a New Jersey-based provider of suite-based and standalone source-to-settle solutions, announced earlier this month the release of its Contract Metadata Extraction Bot, powered by the Merlin AI Studio. Readers may recall that in July, we covered the forthcoming release of Merlin after yours truly attended Zycus’s analyst day in Park City, UT. As a refresher, Merlin AI Studio is Zycus’s family of intelligent bots for its entire source-to-settle solution suite. It leverages elements of AI, such as machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and robotic process automation, to providing autonomous procurement up and down the source-to-settle process.
After users manually upload contractual documents (customer/vendor contracts, MSAs, SOWs, etc.; and these can be machine-readable or scanned images), the Zycus Merlin Contract Metadata Extraction Bot gets to work by scanning the documents and identifying numerous common contract metadata (such as effective date, expiration date, renewal date, etc.) and customer-specific data. Users can run the Merlin Bot from iContract, Zycus’s platform-based contract management application. They can also pull that data onto iContract or use the Merlin bot as a standalone application with another contract management tool.
EcoVadis Kicks Off 2020 with $200 Million in Additional Funding
2020 begins with exciting news for EcoVadis, a Paris and New York-based provider of supply chain sustainability and ethical sourcing rating services. It recently announced that it has received $200 million in investment funding from CVC Growth partners in its bid to scale globally into new countries and markets to meet the rising demand for sustainability and broader environmental, social, and governance (ESG) solutions for supply chains. CVC Growth Partners is seen not only as a source of funding, but also as a partner that has global reach and can help EcoVadis in its global expansion campaign.
DHL Acquires Riskpulse, Looks to Merge it with Resilience360
In other news, DHL, the Germany-based logistics and postal services company, announced that along with its investment partners, Columbia Capital and Greenspring Associates, it is acquiring Austin, TX-based Riskpulse and will combine it with its own supply chain risk intelligence and management arm, Resilience360. Riskpulse provides a SaaS solution that quantifies the various risks associated with shipping, logistics, and supply chain management, and provides customers with risk mitigation plans up to two weeks in advance of a shipping date. For now, DHL and partners will maintain the Riskpulse brand, but later in the year, they will merge the two companies under a unified brand that markets their combined and unique supply chain risk intelligence and analytics capabilities.
Bamboo Rose Makes it Easier to Collaborate on its Platform
Late last month, Bamboo Rose, a Boston-area business-network provider that specializes in driving new product innovation among trading parties, announced that it has introduced a slew of updates to its supplier innovation and collaboration platform. These updates provide greater visibility into component and material inventory levels, a detailed, visual timelines that aide in project/team management, and an enhanced ability to limit material waste (which is a growing sustainability concern). The product update also features greater mobility features, like commonality with IOS and Android formatting (e.g., the ability to pull down on a screen to refresh the page), and mobile content uploading – either online or offline.
Tealbook Receives $5 Million in Seed Plus Funding
In a last bit of news, we recently learned that Toronto-based Tealbook, which provides a cloud-based, machine learning-enabled supplier information and data monitoring platform, has received $5 million in seed-plus funding in a round led by Refinery Ventures. Tealbook will use the investment to further innovate its products and solutions, specifically with regard to machine learning, and expand its sales and marketing operations to scale globally and meet rising demand for smarter supplier information and monitoring solutions, as these are seen as crucial for overcoming data and information overload in a data-rich world.
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