CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up Series returns today with fresh supply management technology news and updates covering a few recent major announcements. 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 info at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!
Corcentric Announces New Corporate Brand
CHERRY HILL, N.J. — Corcentric, a leading global provider of best-in-class procurement and finance solutions, announced its new brand highlighting how the organization uniquely solves customers’ business challenges by forming seamless partnerships to diagnose pain points and deliver tailor-made solutions. In addition to an updated website, logo, and collateral, Corcentric debuted a new tagline: Proven results. Built together.
According to Matt Clark, president and COO at Corcentric, “Every business is one-of-a-kind, and our brand evolution is a direct result of the unique relationship we have with our customers,” he said. “We know the way to achieve results that will stand up to today’s turmoil and tomorrow’s surprises is to give every business the individualized attention it deserves. This is our customer promise — and something our new brand fully represents.”
The company states that Corcentric leverages smarter services and technology across the procurement and finance lifecycle, allowing customers to optimize profitability by reducing costs, increasing efficiencies, and improving cash flow. And with real-time visibility into spend, smarter analytics, and accurate forecasting, customers can focus on strategic growth planning.
Nancy Pearson, chief marketing officer at Corcentric, added, “Our current culture strongly supports and aligns more closely with our new purpose-driven value proposition. We help customers address their unique business challenges with technology solutions that are customized for them in the way they want to consume.”
Read the full announcement here.
Zip Raises $100 Million Series C at $1.5 Billion Valuation
SAN FRANCISCO — Zip, a leading intake-to-pay platform, announced its $100 million Series C funding round at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation, with investment from Y Combinator, CRV and Tiger Global. This brings Zip’s total funding to $181 million with its prior seed, $25 million Series A, and $43 million Series B rounds.
The company also announced its product launch of Zip Intake-to-Pay, extending its industry-first Intake-to-Procure platform for modern spend approvals to now provide procure-to-pay (P2P) capabilities. With new purchase order (PO) management, accounts payable (AP) automation, and global B2B payments functionality, Zip provides a unified platform for the end-to-end procurement lifecycle. Zip’s latest funding will allow the company to accelerate product and user experience innovations to increase employee adoption across its rapidly growing customer base, including new applications of generative AI that maximize efficiency and synthesize insights across the intake-to-pay process.
According to Rujul Zaparde, co-founder and CEO of Zip, “Businesses are no longer able to turn a blind eye when it comes to controlling spend, operating efficiently, and mitigating risk. Our recent survey of finance and accounting professionals found that nearly half of organizations are looking to meaningfully reduce operating expenses this year, yet only 11% said that the majority of spend in their organization is under management, or PO-backed,” he said.
“It all starts with a renewed focus on employee adoption and end-user experience. In a space that is notorious for providing tools that cause confusion, lack of adoption and costly deployment errors, we’ve built a holistic, consumer-style and enterprise-grade Intake-to-Pay platform. It doesn’t require any training — and employees are excited to use it,” Zaparde added.
Read the full announcement here.
GEP Enhances Its Procurement Solutions Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service
CLARK, N.J. — GEP, a leading provider of supply chain strategy, software, and services to Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises worldwide, announced the launch of a suite of solutions within GEP SOFTWARE that uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology through Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. This integration offers clients an intuitive interface to query data, automate processes, and improve decision-making to optimize operations.
According to Subhash Makhija, chief executive officer for GEP, “The AI capabilities from Microsoft are a giant leap forward. This integration provides our clients with a conversational-based interface that is more intuitive, allowing them to derive actionable insights and improve global procurement and supply operations like never before, unlocking new levels of efficiency and productivity,” he said.
“We’re using generative AI capabilities through Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to identify operational gaps and risks in supplier contracts and brainstorm ways to optimize procurement and value chains,” Makhija added.
Read the full announcement here.
Sastrify Raises $32 Million Series B Funding to Scale Next Generation SaaS Procurement Platform
COLOGNE and NEW YORK — Sastrify announced its $32 million Series B financing round led by Endeit Capital, with participation from Simon Capital and previous investors HV Capital, FirstMark Capital, and TriplePoint Capital. The additional funds will go towards scaling the global team focused on the United States and Europe and further accelerating product development to support mid-market and enterprise customers.
According to Sastrify data, the typical company overspends by more than 30 percent on their SaaS costs and wastes more than 400 hours per year on managing their SaaS contracts. Sastrify’s all-in-one platform allows users to centralize, visualize, and automate their entire SaaS procurement journey. With the launch of its exclusive pre-negotiated commercial offerings via the Sastrify Marketplace, teams can find and evaluate tools, streamline their procurement processes, optimize their SaaS stack, and make insights-driven decisions.
The company states that it has built a platform that enables procurement, finance, and IT teams to fully optimize all aspects of their software procurement. The company’s hundreds of customers around the world have validated its platform as the comprehensive SaaS procurement solution. Sastrify is positioned to grow its team and continue to work with companies to focus and accelerate their efforts to reduce their risk, save hours per week, and save up to seven figures on their SaaS costs.
According to Jan Leicht, partner at Simon Capital, “Most grown-up and mature companies are just at the beginning of their SaaS adoption curve. At the same time, they are facing an increasingly complex SaaS landscape that won’t make their procurement lives any easier. We believe that Sastrify’s platform can effectively empower these enterprises to cope with this new complexity.”
Read the full announcement here.
