AI procurement management software startup Vertice raises $50M – News

Procurement software startup Vertice Technology Inc. said today it has finalized a $50 million funding round led by Lakestar, bringing its total amount raised to more than $100 million, and its valuation to a reported $500 million.

Perpetual Growth and CF Private Equity also participated in the Series C round, alongside existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and 83North, the company said.

Vertice is the creator of an expenditure management platform that introduces a unified, artificial intelligence-driven orchestration layer to optimize companies’ spending on software and cloud computing infrastructure. One advantage of this AI orchestration layer is that it can provide numerous data points and insights that can help customers make better, faster buying decisions.

Vertice co-founder and Chief Executive Roy Tuvey announced the round in a blog post, where he outlined a vision of a modern procurement software platform that enables accurate decision-making. Such a platform needs real-time pricing benchmarks, insights into best-choice solutions, alerts on maverick spending and collaboration and analytics tools to support every stage of the buying process. That’s what Vertice provides, he said.

Armed with these capabilities, Vertice sees itself as the “integrated backbone” of companies’ procurement and financial operations, enabling them to scale more efficiently. It’s focused on eliminating the friction that comes with procurement, so organizations can spend more time innovating while maintaining full control and transparency over their financial processes and spending.

Tuvey says procurement has become a key issue for organizations these days, highlighting examples such as Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Elon Musk as the head of a new “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE.

“Scrutiny of spend has increased, while the capability to deliver savings has not,” Tuvey said. “Businesses operate globally. Vendors are multiplying with overlapping capabilities. Buying is increasingly decentralised. Data is siloed and actionable insights are rare — all of which undermine the fundamentals of best practice procurement: control, visibility and transparency.”

The need to solve this is likely to become more acute. Data from Gartner Inc. suggests that organizations will increase their spending on data centers, software, communications services and related information technology by 9% this year, to just under $5 trillion. Clearly, there’s a lot of potential in terms of optimizing that level of spending.

Vertice isn’t alone in trying to aid companies with this problem. Its competitors include platforms like Spendbase Inc., Spendesk SAS and G2.com Inc, as well as Gartner itself.

Tuvey said Vertice differentiates itself from these rivals by integrating a wider set of business data to make better suggestions regarding procurement. It utilizes the same approach that a cybersecurity firm might employ to better understand network activity, building up a picture of what a company does, what it needs to do that, and how much it typically spends on that. It will then attempt to find a better way of doing things.

In some ways, Vertice can be considered akin to a large software procurement model, which is guided more by software usage within companies, rather than by facts and insights.

Tuvey told News in an interview that the platform is especially focused on contract information, which is ingested by its AI models. With this data, it creates AI copilots that can help customers with purchasing, automating many of the processes that finance teams would have done manually before.

“We surface benchmark pricing insights and analytics that they need at the point of purchase,” Tuvey said. “AI is really interesting when it comes to procurement orchestration, because you can learn where the company has bottlenecks in their processes.”

He gave an example of a company that often experiences bottlenecks when checking pricing and security compliance, saying that Vertice is able to run these processes in parallel to speed things up.

Businesses are increasingly sold on what Vertice is offering, especially in Europe. The company says its customers include the chipmaking equipment manufacturer ASML Holdings N.V., the global banking giant Santander Bank N.A. and the investment giant Euronext N.V.

Altogether, it has facilitated more than $3.4 billion worth of software spending on behalf of its clients, helping them to achieve savings of up to 30%, while curtailing maverick spending and reducing the length of their procurement cycles. As a result, its revenue has grown more than 13-fold in the last two years, off an undisclosed base.

Looking forward, Vertice will use the funds from today’s round to enhance its AI platform and capabilities, open new regional offices to try and break into new markets, and expand its engineering team. New capabilities on its roadmap include document extraction and a library of ready-to-use procurement templates, plus detailed workflow analytics.

Images: Vertice