Vertice Raises $50M to Revolutionize SaaS Spend Management with AI

Vertice, a London-based startup, has secured $50 million in a Series C funding round to expand its vision of transforming how businesses manage their software and cloud expenditure. The round was led by new investor Lakestar, with participation from Perpetual Growth, CF Private Equity, and previous backers Bessemer Venture Partners and 83North.

Vertice has made a name for itself in the crowded expenditure management space by focusing on the application of AI to optimize an area where businesses are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars annually: software and cloud spend. The startup's business has grown 13x in the three years since its inception, mirroring the rapid increase in software spend.

"[Vertice] is designed to standardize companies' processes around how they buy anything, not just software and cloud," said Roy Tuvey, Vertice's CEO and co-founder. "A lot of companies today have disparate solutions, different silos that they look at, and procurement teams are generally under a lot of pressure to deliver savings and efficiencies. They don't have amazing technology today. So we've brought it all together in a unified and simplified platform."

Vertice's unique approach involves integrating with a business's data to better understand its software usage patterns and make informed recommendations. The startup has built a "large software procurement model," akin to a large language model, where the parameters are software usage data rather than facts and insights. Vertice claims to have ingested data on some $3.4 billion worth of SaaS and cloud expenditure, as well as benchmarking data on more than 16,000 software vendors.

By leveraging this data and AI-powered insights, Vertice aims to help customers speed up the purchasing process and achieve savings of 20% to 30%. The startup's co-founder, Roy Tuvey, explained how the AI can identify bottlenecks in a company's procurement processes and suggest ways to streamline them, ultimately improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

"For example, if a company is always spending a long time with certain steps, for example to check pricing but also security compliance, we can see how to run them in parallel and save time," Tuvey said. "And you can just imagine — the more and more apps you have, the AI can learn and make recommendations."

The investment from Lakestar, a new investor in Vertice, is a testament to the startup's growth and the increasing importance of expenditure management in the current economic climate. Georgia Watson, the Lakestar partner leading this round, noted that some of Lakestar's portfolio companies are already using Vertice, and the feedback has been "overwhelmingly positive."

With the new funding, Vertice plans to further expand its reach and continue innovating its AI-powered SaaS spend management platform. As businesses strive to optimize their operational costs, particularly in the face of funding constraints, Vertice's unique approach to expenditure management is poised to become an increasingly valuable solution in the enterprise market.