Bid Ops, a leading cloud platform for procurement automation, announced it raised $1.75 million in seed funding led by Illuminate Ventures and Cervin Ventures. Correlation VC also participated in this round.
Founded by CTO Andrew Jones and CEO Edmund Zagorin, Bid Ops eliminates the tedious and previously manual busywork from the negotiation process. And Bid Ops also enables top procurement teams to execute against strategic business objectives.
“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 Zagorin. “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 $1.25M on a $4M 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.”
Supply chain management impacts over $25 trillion in commerce spending across a wide variety of product and service categories. And Bid Ops helps solve the problem where buyers and vendors rely primarily on long email chains and spreadsheets require manual data entry.
Specifically, 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 the performance on the contract.
Plus Bid Ops enables procurement executives to leverage these forecasts to compare and contrast bids. And then it obtains more competitive pricing and commercial relationships with vendor partners.
“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,” added Illuminate Ventures founder and managing partner Cindy Padnos. “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.”
Bid Ops uses sourcing automation to expand contracting opportunities for public sector customers, including Los Angeles World Airports and the City of Detroit. And Bid Ops’ technology customizes and curates a vendor database based on customers’ award goals and recently drove more than a 667% increase in digital vendor engagement for City Innovate’s flagship Startup-in-Residence program — which supports vendor partnerships for over 30 cities and agencies across the U.S.
