CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up series continues this week 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!
Zip Secures $190 Million in Landmark Series D Funding
SAN FRANCISCO — Zip, one of the world’s leading AI-powered procurement orchestration platforms, announced $190 million in Series D funding led by BOND. This landmark investment — one of the largest for an enterprise SaaS company this year — brings Zip’s valuation to $2.2 billion, a significant increase from its $1.5 billion valuation in 2023. Additional participants in the round included new investors DST Global, Adams Street, and Alkeon, along with existing investors Y Combinator and CRV.
The company stated that Each year, companies spend trillions of dollars on everything from office supplies and software subscriptions to professional services and marketing agencies. Procurement represents the second largest area of business spend after payroll, yet despite its enormous financial impact, the purchasing process has remained stuck in the past – slow, complex, and riddled with inefficiencies.
According to Rujul Zaparde, co-founder and CEO of Zip, “Procurement is broken,” he said. “Companies are wasting billions of dollars and countless hours navigating byzantine approval processes, dealing with security risks, and manually entering data.
“Zip has already proven that we can fix that, saving our customers billions of dollars and thousands of hours of time — and our new round of funding will allow us to continue to revolutionize business spending,” Zaparde added.
The new funding will fuel Zip’s mission to become the global standard for B2B spend and will be strategically deployed to:
- Accelerate R&D efforts, doubling down on Zip’s approach to building best-in-class procurement software entirely in-house. This includes further development of Zip’s highly successful Procure-to-Pay (P2P) product line, which has seen explosive growth and adoption by major enterprises like Northwestern Mutual, Toast, and Coinbase. The funding will also support expansion into new product lines to address evolving market needs.
- Establish the Zip AI Lab to continue to rapidly develop and deploy cutting-edge AI solutions that integrate effortlessly with legacy enterprise systems. Zip’s existing AI suite has already dramatically improved procurement processes across legal, security, finance, and IT teams.
- Broaden global expansion with a particular focus on the EMEA region where Zip has already seen over 200% growth in the past year. Zip will leverage its new London office and expanded EMEA team to meet surging demand across the UK, Germany, and France. This expansion will solidify Zip’s position as the go-to procurement solution for large enterprises worldwide.
Read the full announcement here.
Avalara Enhances Tax Automation on Purchases with AvaTax for Accounts Payable
DURHAM, N.C. — Avalara, Inc., a leading provider of tax compliance automation software for businesses of all sizes, announced expanded capabilities of AvaTax with AvaTax for Accounts Payable. The enhancement provides a comprehensive solution built into AvaTax that is designed to automate tax calculation and compliance for purchases. The solution ensures more accurate tax calculation by identifying both over- and underpaid taxes on purchases.
According to Jayme Fishman, chief strategy and product officer at Avalara, “As an end-to-end compliance platform, AvaTax offers businesses a singular solution for managing both sales and purchases, consolidating their tax compliance efforts into one efficient system,” he said.
“Using our cloud-native approach to software development, AvaTax for Accounts Payable not only simplifies the compliance process, but also provides greater visibility and control over tax obligations, helping Avalara customers stay compliant with ease.”
The company stated that without the right systems and processes in place, underpayments and overpayments are inevitable, and both have financial implications and inherent risk.
Read the full announcement here.
HARMAN Launches Generative AI Solutions in AWS Marketplace
STAMFORD, Conn. — HARMAN Digital Transformations Solutions, a strategic business dedicated to blending the physical and digital to make business technology more dynamic, announced that ForecastGPT, a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI)-driven forecasting solution that uses advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned on domain-specific multivariate time series datasets, is now available in AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The company stated that the solution was designed with a singular focus on predictive analytics, with HARMAN ForecastGPT allowing for a deeper understanding of complex data patterns and more accurate forecasting without requiring any predefined templates or formulas.
Utilizing advanced GPT technology, HARMAN ForecastGPT has reasoning capabilities while providing detailed commentary to explain trends in data. It is designed for businesses that need to make accurate predictions and informed decisions and operate in dynamic and uncertain markets, where demand and supply can vary significantly.
According to Dr. Jai Ganesh, chief product officer at HARMAN Digital Transformation Solutions, “HARMAN is dedicated to delivering cutting-edge technology solutions that enable our clients with differentiated experiences. This is achieved through integrating digital technologies, cloud platforms, mobility, enterprise automation, AI-generated insights, and the Internet of Things (IoT), all supported by scalable IT infrastructures,” he stated.
“Our expanding presence in AWS Marketplace underscores this commitment, making it easier for AWS customers to access and procure our advanced technology offerings.”
Read the full announcement here.
Fortanix and Sectigo Partnership Uplevels Software Supply Chain Security
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Fortanix, Inc., a leader in data-first cybersecurity and pioneer of Confidential Computing, announced a new partnership with Sectigo, a global leader in certificate lifecycle management (CLM) and WebPKI solutions, enabling enterprises to secure their software supply chain by automating the issuance of code-signing certificates.
The partnership gives enterprises a fast, scalable solution to automate and control their urgent and ballooning need to create, track, and attest private key security without slowing down developer workflows.
The company stated that businesses rely on securing their CI/CD pipelines with public key infrastructure (PKI) and certificates to certify the integrity and origin at each stage of development — code signing. This process is necessary to ensure a high level of security, but its time-consuming nature often disrupts developer workflows and stifles innovation. The Fortanix and Sectigo partnership addresses this by enabling enterprises to automate and scale the security of their digital supply chains with purpose-built platforms that meet modern business needs.
According to Anand Kashyap, CEO and co-founder of Fortanix, “Fortanix, like Sectigo, has built its services for automation, which is the only way for enterprises to truly scale and secure their CI/CD pipelines,” he said. “Security and speed are two elements that help separate dev teams from the competition, and this partnership delivers both.”
Read the full announcement here.
