YC Continuity Leads Round With Participation From Tiger Global and CRV; Company Achieves $81 Million in Total Investment Within 18 Months of Founding
Zip, the world’s leading intake-to-procure solution, today announced its $43 million Series B funding round led by YC Continuity with participation from Tiger Global and CRV. This brings Zip’s total funding to $81 million and the company’s valuation to $1.2 billion in just 18 months since its founding, with its $25 million Series A and multiple seed-round investments in that time frame. Zip’s enterprise-grade platform enables employees to make business purchases with a consumer-style experience. Founded in 2020 by Rujul Zaparde and Lu Cheng, Zip boasts more than 100 customers, including industry leaders such as Canva, Snowflake, Roblox, Coinbase, Airtable, Toast, Webflow and Databricks. The company rapidly grew to more than 130 employees – with top-tier engineers from Silicon Valley tech innovators like Airbnb, Meta, Google and Square. The latest round will be used to accelerate adoption and talent acquisition, with plans to double employee headcount by the end of 2022.
“The simple task of buying software or services has become hopelessly complicated at even the most innovative companies in the world,” said Ali Rowghani, managing partner at YC Continuity. “As purchasing has become increasingly decentralized, many stakeholders in the process – finance, legal, IT and the business users themselves – have become increasingly frustrated. Zip is the first single source of truth for a modern decentralized procurement process. Zip provides an intuitive front door and clear visualization of the entire workflow so that each stakeholder has visibility into what’s going on. We invested in Zip’s world class team because they’ve elegantly solved this ubiquitous business problem and created a product that procurement, legal, finance, IT and business users all love.”
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Zip Is the New Concierge for Procurement
Finance and procurement teams from organizations of all sizes struggle to keep up with the rapid adoption of technology and services driven by digital transformation. The friction has only increased as purchasing decisions have become more decentralized. Zip provides an effortless welcome experience for any employee to request a business-related purchase; orchestration of that purchase through complex approval workflows; and complete visibility for all stakeholders throughout the process.
Zip starts with the world’s easiest experience for employees to initiate a procurement request, whether it be software, services or something else. The employee begins by answering a conditional intake form. From there, Zip automatically generates a policy-based approval workflow involving any number of required stakeholders and steps, in parallel or in sequence. All stakeholders, from the requestor to procurement to approvers across all cross-functional teams, can then see a clear view of the approvals required for their request. Finance, legal, procurement, IT, security and privacy instantly and at any moment in time know exactly what is going on for any request, at any stage.
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Zip delivers a consumer-grade, intuitive one-stop experience – no training of any kind required. By contrast, a company’s typical procurement process requires three to six teams and disparate systems, five or more hours of training just to initiate a request and more than 25 emails. In a distributed spend environment, CFOs and procurement leaders need employee adoption of their centralized systems to gain the benefits of everyone following the official process. With Zip, CFOs and procurement leaders see major improvements in spend visibility, savings and compliance by providing employees with a fast, easy experience they are happy to use.
“It’s incredible how quickly industry thought leaders across Procurement, Finance, and IT are moving to Zip,” said Michael Denari, head of global spend and business systems at Canva. “Before Zip, employees were bogged down with many duplicative intakes in various systems, whereas Zip now orchestrates the intake process into one integrated, frictionless experience.”
In addition, Zip’s platform provides pre-built, best-in-class and configurable no-code workflows for any non-technical employee to design a world-class process. The procurement workflow is inherently complex as it spans across many different teams and systems. Zip takes a unique approach as the front-door and orchestration layer with flexible, pre-built connectors to key business systems including ERPs like NetSuite, Workday and others; contract management software such as Ironclad and DocuSign; IT ticketing software such as Jira and ServiceNow; and most importantly, communication software like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Zip’s pre-built connectors into other systems enable each team to leverage their preferred software tools – without having to log into Zip. For companies that do not yet have some or all of these systems, approvers simply approve or reject natively in Zip or over Slack and email.
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“Coinbase is the most trusted and secure crypto platform. It is crucial for us to adhere to best in class compliance and risk management standards, while creating a seamless employee procurement experience. Over my 20+ years in procurement, I’ve never been this excited about procurement software. Our employees love Zip – it’s even become a verb here,” said Cindy Yan, VP of source to pay and supplier management at Coinbase.
Co-founder and CEO of Zip, Rujul Zaparde, explained, “The explosion of SaaS and the decentralization of purchasing decisions have created tremendous friction for modern businesses. Everyday employees trying to solve business challenges and innovate through new software or service vendor purchases have been severely underserved by antiquated, manual processes and clunky, legacy software that no one wants to log into.”
Zaparde continued, “I’ve witnessed firsthand how frustrating it is for business users to navigate byzantine processes in the procurement process. People are left wondering not only how to get started, but how to secure all of the proper approvals to get what they need to do their jobs. This latest investment will allow us to bring our enterprise-grade platform to more forward-thinking businesses and fulfill our mission to reinvent the way organizations manage their procurement process.”
