$50 million in financing! Vertice uses AI to reshape the new ecology of enterprise procurement management

London startup Vertice stands out in the spend management space, focusing on using artificial intelligence technology to optimize enterprise spending on software and cloud services. With businesses investing hundreds of billions of dollars in these areas, Vertice has grown 13x over the past three years and successfully secured a new round of $50 million in funding to expand its business vision.

Roy Tuvey, CEO and co-founder of Vertice, said the company's goal is to standardize the procurement process for enterprises, not just software and cloud services. Currently, many companies use different solutions for procurement, resulting in process fragmentation. Procurement teams are under great pressure to save costs and improve efficiency. Their technology is not yet complete, so Vertice provides a unified and streamlined platform to help businesses procure more efficiently.

The financing was led by new investor Lakestar, with participation from Perpetual Growth and CF Private Equity, and previous investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and 83North. Vertice has raised about $100 million so far. Although the valuation has not been disclosed, Tuvey confirmed that the valuation of this financing is higher than the "hundreds of millions of dollars" a year ago.

Vertice's customer base is also growing, with customers across Europe, the United States and Asia Pacific, including well-known companies such as ASML, Euronext, Grant Thornton and Santander.

According to Gartner forecasts, with the popularity of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, spending on data centers, software and related IT and communications services is expected to grow by more than 9% to nearly US$5 trillion by 2025. Such a large market has attracted competition from many enterprises, and Vertice faces competition from platforms such as Spendbase, Spendesk, Gartner and G2.

Tuvey noted that Vertice is unique in its ability to deeply integrate with an enterprise's data to better understand its needs. Vertice builds a "big software procurement model" similar to a big language model to provide recommendations based on an enterprise's actual software usage. The company has accumulated approximately $3.4 billion in SaaS and cloud spending data and benchmarks more than 16,000 software vendors.

Customers use Vertice to speed up the purchasing process and save money. Vertice says it can typically cut the procurement cycle in half, resulting in cost savings of 20 to 30 percent. Tuvey said the company uses AI technology to obtain contract information and build procurement assistance tools to help finance teams automate work that previously needed to be done manually. At the same time, AI technology can also identify bottlenecks in an enterprise's procurement process, thereby optimizing the entire procurement process.

With the current increasing demand from enterprises to reduce operating costs, Vertice's services have attracted the attention of more and more investors. Georgia Watson, a partner at Lakestar, said some portfolio companies are using Vertice's services and the feedback has been very positive.