Simfoni Announces Xeeva Acquisition
This morning, Simfoni, a digital procurement solution provider, announced that it had acquired Xeeva, a spend management and procurement technology provider. The second major acquisition for the company this year (EC Sourcing was the first in a deal that combined Simfoni’s core spend intelligence module with EC Sourcing’s strategic sourcing platform).
According to Simfoni Chairman, Chirag Shah, “Combining forces with Xeeva represents a very rare and unique opportunity to leverage a highly complementary and synergistic solution provider to scale our operational infrastructure and extend competencies in a way that further differentiates our Composable Procurement™ concept.”
Ardent’s Instant Analysis
Founded in 2015, Simfoni began as a global company with operations in both Dubai and London. Today, the company is led by Chirang Shah, founder and executive chairman and two industry veteran CEOs: Ron Emma, co-founder and CEO – eSourcing (and former CEO of EC Sourcing), and David Bush, CEO – Spend Automation. Currently, there are more than 100 employees working across 29 countries.
The combination of Simfoni and EC Sourcing this year was a nice marriage of two companies that had flown under the radar screen of the overall procurement solutions market. Each company had a strong core offering, solid team, and good leadership. With the EC Sourcing acquisition, Simfoni has started to make real strides in the market with its unique combination of technology solution and managed services that cut across the full scope of procurement operations.
Founded in 2014, Xeeva has been working with large and mid-sized enterprises to transform their procurement processes by improving their spend visibility and simplifying their indirect spend management by using its patented AI-powered software (Xeeva’s Patent US10176427 B2 expands on previous patents issued to the company that allow it to enrich spend data after it has gone through the classification and cleansing process — at the line-item level rather than at the supplier level) to classify, categorize, and enrich indirect spend data. Xeeva’s combination of machine learning, AI, and industry expertise and insights can help procurement teams simplify, consolidate, manage, control, and conduct all spend-related activities in one place.
The acquisition of Xeeva follows a similar recipe: find a company with lesser known with good, complementary technology and build its offerings into a larger portfolio of solutions. However, from a size standpoint, Xeeva is a much larger company than EC Sourcing with an estimated 200+ employees making this deal several times more complex from a talent, technology, and operational standpoint. And, while the deal is described by the company as complementary, Simfoni offers a larger suite of solutions (click here to read Ardent’s recent article on Simfoni’s current offering and strategy) including a spend analytics engine, so how the Xeeva technology and services will plug in remains to be seen. Simfoni had a very successful 2022. It is, overnight, a much larger company. How it succeeds in 2023 will depend on how well it manages this major acquisition
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