First-Mover AI Procurement Platform Bid Ops Lands $1.75 Million in Seed Funding to Automate Vendor Negotiations

By STS News Desk On Mar 8, 2019

First-Mover AI Procurement Platform Bid Ops Lands $1.75 Million in Seed Funding to Automate Vendor Negotiations

The Bid Ops AI Procurement Automation Cloud synthesizes current and historical data points in minutes to forecast the outcome of a vendor negotiation before it begins, surfacing insights that drive market-leading savings

Bid Ops, the leading cloud platform for procurement automation, announced it has raised $1.75 million in seed funding, led by Illuminate Ventures and Cervin Ventures, with participation from Correlation VC. By eliminating tedious, previously manual busywork from the negotiation process, Bid Ops enables top procurement teams to execute against strategic business objectives. Supply chain management impacts more than $25 trillion in commerce spending across a wide variety of product and service categories. Until now, buyers and vendors relied primarily on long email chains and spreadsheets that required manual data entry. The result was procurement negotiations that created inefficient bottlenecks where buyers overpay or base their business partnerships on suboptimal terms.

The Bid Ops Procurement Automation Cloud upends the status quo by using AI to create a target price for each line item that accounts for value-based assessments of a vendor’s qualifications and likely performance on the contract. Bid Ops enables procurement executives to leverage these forecasts to compare and contrast bids, and obtain more competitive pricing and commercial relationships with growth-oriented vendor partners.

“Procurement is not only a critical process that has a direct and profound impact on how a business operates, it should be seen as a massive opportunity and potential competitive edge for a business to become more efficient than its peers,” said Edmund Zagorin, Founder and CEO of Bid Ops. “The stakes have never been higher due to escalating uncertainty around raw materials prices given the impact of tariffs. Bid Ops users recently executed an automated negotiation for raw materials for a Fortune 100 customer that saved $1.25 Million on a $4 Million contract in less than 90 minutes. By harnessing the power of market benchmarks and predictive analysis, Bid Ops helps procurement teams beat the market in an era of global price volatility and trade wars.”

Built by procurement professionals with decades of experience, Bid Ops accelerates business partnerships between top buyers and leading suppliers by enabling straightforward, actionable comparisons between vendors based on both performance and price. As a result, customers get better offers from more vendors in less time, and can focus on what matters most: awarding contracts to the best vendor at the best price.

Using sourcing automation, Bid Ops also expands contracting opportunities for public sector customers, including Los Angeles World Airports and the City of Detroit. Bid Ops technology customizes and curates a vendor database based on customers’ award goals and recently drove an over 667% increase in digital vendor engagement for City Innovate’s flagship Startup-in-Residence program, supporting vendor partnerships for over 30 cities and agencies across the United States.

“We’re delighted to partner with Bid Ops as they deliver against the promise of automated solutions leveraging AI to help solve some of the most enduring business problems,” said Cindy Padnos, founder and managing partner at Illuminate Ventures. “Procurement is particularly well-suited to this kind of opportunity, since materials and services purchases represent the single largest area of spend – after personnel costs– for most businesses. The deep domain knowledge of the Bid Ops team combined with their amazingly happy customers made this investment opportunity a standout.”

SOURCE Bid Ops