Globality, a Menlo Park, California-based smart sourcing platform founded by Joel Hyatt and Lior Delgo to connect multinational companies with service providers at the right price, has raised $100 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund. Including this round of funding, Globality has raised $172 million since launching over three years ago.
Globality’s artificial intelligence powered platform is disrupting the procurement of B2B services and revolutionizing the RFP process. And Globality efficiently matches companies with service providers that meet their specific needs, which cuts the sourcing process from months to hours and delivers savings of 20% or more for companies.
Some of Globality’s previous investors include former Vice President Al Gore, Dennis Nally (former Global Chairman of PwC), Ken Goldman (former CFO of Yahoo), John R. Joyce (former Chief Financial Officer of IBM), and Mark Vorsatz (CEO of Andersen Tax). In conjunction with this funding round, SoftBank Investment Advisers Jeffrey Housenbold and Ted Fike are joining Globality’s board of directors.
With this funding round, it will enable Globality to accelerate its growth through investment in artificial intelligence technology, increase business capacity by hiring more talent, expanding its marketing and sales programs to drive brand awareness, and acquire enterprise businesses.
“I’m excited to welcome the SoftBank Vision Fund as the latest investor in Globality. It is a strong vote of confidence in our vision to revolutionize how companies source services. This investment will accelerate our efforts to empower companies to find and select the best service providers at the right price for every project, while enabling greater economic inclusion around the world,” said Hyatt in a statement. “Globality’s AI technology does away with the antiquated, analog RFP process and instead creates a level playing field that gives all companies, no matter their size or location, an opportunity to compete based on the merits of proven performance, expertise, and passion.”
How does Globality work? When companies are looking to source external providers in sectors like marketing, consulting, legal, IT, and HR, they are guided through Globality’s Platform using AI technology. And through a dynamic exchange between the client and the platform, Globality’s AI bot — which is known as Glo — uses natural language processing technology to both create and analyze the client’s Smart Brief to deliver on the needs of any project.
Glo runs through a database of more than 17,000 potential providers in 100 countries spanning more than 600,000 professionals. Glo analyzes millions of data points from a provider’s location, culture, and work history down the expertise of individual staff members. Then it finds a matching service provider at the right price for every project.
Globality’s platform allows clients to easily compare the best matches recommended by Glo. And once companies have a selected a provider, Glo will be able to learn from client feedback about how well the provider is performing. By using an artificial intelligence platform rather than RFP process, it saves clients significant time and money through competitive pricing pressure from providers of all sizes anywhere in the world including the client’s existing suppliers.
“Professional services represent a multi-trillion global market but procurement is mainly still a cumbersome manual process. Globality has spent several years in developing proprietary AI-enabled matchmaking capabilities to address these inefficiencies head-on,” added Housenbold. “Pioneering a two-sided, international marketplace creates benefits for both enterprise clients and service providers, and with it the potential for Globality to capture massive network effects as the platform continues to scale. It’s exciting to support Joel and his team on this journey.”
