Procurement teams have long relied on analytics to understand spend, but turning spend visibility into meaningful action at speed has been a challenge. That challenge has come into sharp focus as data has grown more complex and expectations ave continued to rise.
In this Startup of the Week conversation, host Jyothi Hartley speaks with Jeff Gerber, co-founder of Suplari, about how their platform connects fragmented procurement data and applies AI to not only surface opportunities, but also help teams act on them in real time.
What does Suplari do?
“Suplari is focused on really bringing the power of AI to procurement. So, we help procurement teams understand their spend, but then go beyond that and actually help them explore scenarios and take away a lot of the busy work of finding opportunities to optimize what they're doing by just showing them things… by using our AI to detect patterns in their spend.
“We've added our AI agent, which goes beyond that by enabling the teams to take action and orchestrate a lot of these activities so that they can capture the value a lot more rapidly.”
What inspired you to start Suplari?
“I saw the value of all these siloed data sets being connected to deliver a lot more transparency. And then very quickly, people would see things that were ‘gotchas,’ or ‘I wish we had addressed this problem before it happened.’ Companies just don't have the time or the bandwidth to monitor tail spend or contract performance, and a lot of these capabilities we can apply AI to and automate.
“The concept was, let’s assume this happens in every large company and build a system that just detects these inefficiencies and tells you what you need to do. We started with the answer and let you go to the analytics to prove that it was a real opportunity, versus having to sift through charts and graphs to find these opportunities.”
What sets Suplari apart in a crowded AI and analytics market?
“We were doing AI before AI was cool. Back in 2017, we built an AI data science platform on top of our analytics layer. Our APIs are rich, and AI can leverage them in really intimate ways and deliver higher quality output than if you had just retrofitted AI on the platform. We’ve been building for AI for eight years. Adding our LLM-powered agent was a very natural fit.”
What confirmed that you were on the right path?
“When our original agents were able to deliver millions of dollars worth of savings opportunities to customers (and we could measure that they actually captured those savings)... that was a huge confirmation point.
“Our agent can now evaluate those opportunities and tell the customer which ones to focus on based on their specific context. And then we go beyond that and show you how to do it, working with it interactively to begin contract renegotiation or change purchasing behavior.”
What changes in procurement make your solution especially relevant today?
“There’s a lot of pressure on procurement to reduce spend, reduce budget, and reduce headcount. We can make procurement teams a lot more efficient and increase the scope of what procurement is addressing, even as headcount gets reduced.
“If you’re slinging spreadsheets and PowerPoints around, that’s probably not what you should be doing nowadays if you can automate that with AI. People need to figure out how to become more strategic… and Suplari can take the busy work off your plate and let you focus on that.”
What misconceptions do companies still have about the problem you solve?
“The biggest one is that we’re not just spend analytics. Transparency is fundamental, but that’s not all that we do… we go significantly farther beyond that.
We really want to help take action and orchestrate and be part of the new sort of agentic operating system for procurement, as that evolves.”
What is the biggest friction point you solve first for procurement teams?
“It’s always been the data.
A lot of companies feel like their data is so bad that they couldn’t even start. That’s really never the case. It doesn’t have to be perfect to get to that first milestone. We get you there quickly and then give you a roadmap to improve your data over time.
Once you unlock the value in your data, you can drive opportunity detection and action on top of that.”
What ROI are customers typically looking for?
“Classically, it’s savings. There’s typically a top-level savings goal.
But what’s more exciting is customers connecting spend data with revenue data and finding new opportunities. For example, identifying the balance of trade with partners and using that to drive outreach for sales teams or uncover risk or opportunity.
There’s a lot of value in this data that most companies don’t leverage.”
Where does Suplari fit within the procurement tech stack?
“Generally, we are still put into the analytics bucket, but we are now significantly moving into the intake and orchestration bucket as well.
We have all of your data connected, normalized, categorized across purchase orders, contracts, and invoices, and all of this intelligence on top of that.
We can inject that into orchestration processes and help execute more efficient workflows and make decisions where they need to be made.”
