Procurify Takes Off

Every organization spends, but does every organization spend intelligently? For the majority of SMBs the answer is probably “no”, at least not yet. Although spend touches every department of an organization, spend is largely managed centrally within a procurement team, frequently located internally within the finance department or as a separate group.

By deferring to another team to make procurement decisions, we as employees, absolve ourselves of the responsibility to own our spend.  How many times have we found that we had overspent, after the fact?  How many times has the new employee arrived and had to wait for her laptop, for days or weeks?

Why is it so difficult to plan spend; to manage and approve simple items?  Why is a paperclip as difficult to procure as an ERP system?  Why is the process manual and paper-based, held together by the paperclip you are trying to order?

These are the challenges that the Procurify Co-Founders decided to tackle. After studying together at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and a stint in the consulting world, Co-Founders Aman Mann (CEO), Kenneth Loi (Chief Customer Officer) and Eugene Dong (CTO), recognized these operational issues were omnipresent and decided to take up the challenge.  And the Procurify rocket was launched.

The three Co-Founders had all experienced this pain point within their careers and realized that although spend management is typically housed within the finance department, spending within a company is a universal activity. The Co-Founders developed their original product focused on purchase orders; however, as they did so, they begun to realize the opportunity in front of them was much more significant. Soon they grew their product offering to also focus on spend management specifically within the SMB market leveraging cross-organizational spend data and machine learning. In its current form, the Procurify platform provides increased visibility and proactive oversight into organizational spend and enables employees to make smart spending decisions and helping to eliminate rogue spending. Procurify’s cloud-based solution makes it simple and easy for their customers to access the platform on desktop or mobile, creates visibility into spending allocation and helps manage the whole process.

Information VP entered Procurify’s story when fellow Vancouverite and Principal at our fund Alex, was introduced to Aman through a former colleague.

We quickly recognized the pain point they were solving.  We geeked out over “Beyond Budgeting” and other tales of finance department pain and processes perfected during the reign of King Ramses II.

So we dug in, and once we did, we were impressed by what we found; a team of passionate individuals and a product that was solving a real-life pain point within SMBs. They understood that tracking spending across departments is increasingly complex and a user-friendly platform was essential to adoption (and thus being able to track spend).  Procurify acts as the bridge between finance teams and the rest of the organization providing unprecedented visibility into the entire spend cycle, including tracking requests, approvals, purchases and real-time analytics. Procurify creates a whole 360 degree solution to help manage the spend process as a whole, person by person, department by department.

We also found a culture passionate about customer success, personal development, humility and transparency.  We saw in them what we saw in ourselves.  And we shared the sloth suit.

Current procurement practices move at the speed of sloths, and that is what we are out to change.

Aman as a sloth – Source (BCBusiness).	Rob as a sloth (left) and Aman (right) discussing the Series B raise with the team.

Today, Procurify boast over 400 customers spread across 75+ countries, and every week, they are finding new places to land the rocket.

We are delighted to partner with the Procurify team, and welcome them to the Information VP family.  We look forward to working with them, providing the fuel and mission control, as they fly the rocket!

– Rob