Our Investment in Relish
We are thrilled to announce a $10M Series A investment in Relish, a leading provider of solutions for businesses to enhance their enterprise procurement systems and processes in areas that include supplier onboarding/verification and account payable automation. Over the past several years, Relish has grown to offer supplier data validation capabilities in over 110 countries, Invoice AI capabilities in over 200 languages, automated contract/price verification, and an AI procurement assistant product among others.
We are looking forward to partnering with Relish co-founders Ryan Walicki and Alex Lopez, and the entire Relish team, who have deep domain expertise in procurement technology. After establishing clear product-market fit and strong traction with customers and stakeholders, we see a meaningful opportunity for the Company to continue to innovate and help customers get the most out of their enterprise procurement systems.
Rise of 3rd Party App Stores in Procurement Software
The procurement software industry is rapidly growing, expected to scale from $6.67 billion in 2022 to $13.80 billion by 2029. The sheer scale of the industry means that the needs of its constituents are quite broad and diverse. This dynamic has led to leading vendors like SAP Ariba and Coupa following in the footsteps of other enterprise software players like Salesforce and Shopify in creating 3rd party app stores to serve a wider range of use cases and solve additional pain points. As has been the case in the Salesforce and Shopify ecosystems, open enterprise procurement platforms like SAP Ariba, Coupa and others are poised to help launch a wave of valuable SaaS businesses that are helping extend the value of their offerings.
Solutions for Supplier Fraud and Payments
Two key areas that Relish is helping address in the procurement process are around preventing supplier fraud and efficiently paying suppliers.
From a fraud perspective, approximately 5% of revenue annually is lost for companies using these procurement platforms due to fraudulent suppliers. This problem is being exacerbated due to the realities of the current macro environment with 90% of businesses willing to switch to suppliers they have never heard of for cheaper prices. With less than 25% of businesses using analytics to prevent this type of fraud, a majority of the market remains vulnerable to come into contact with fraudulent suppliers.
On the payments side of the equation, there is an opportunity to create a more efficient process for paying suppliers and modernizing the overall procure-to-pay process. Oftentimes for accounts payable and procurement teams, processing invoices requires significant man-hours and can take weeks to reconcile. Specifically, It takes businesses 10+ days on average to process a single invoice. Extended payment cycles hurt supplier relationships, while also signaling productivity and work quality issues within the accounts payable function.
-Roger Hurwitz, Dave Gordon, Sinjon Goldberg
