ORO Labs, the enterprise procurement orchestration solution vendor, has raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Norwest Venture Partners and B Capital. XYZ Venture Capital, Array Ventures and some other investors also participated.
ORO was founded in 2020 by Sudhir Bhojwani, CEO, Lalitha Rajagopalan, head of strategy and GTM and Yuan Tung, CTO. They had all held senior positions at SAP Ariba and realized there was a gap in the market to improve the speed, agility and compliance for procurement teams. They have built a supplier engagement platform that decentralizes and streamlines procurement processes using prebuilt and context-specific workflows. The solution currently focuses on use cases within life science, financial services and manufacturing.
Will ORO labs focus on R&D?
ORO will use this latest funding round to accelerate the delivery and deployment of its platform. It is recruiting for engineering and product management roles currently. Presumably, this also means that it will also use the funds to power sales and marketing, which is unclear. The firm will continue to extend its smart workflows, which it recently announced at NetSuite SuiteWorld, where it emerged from stealth. Since then, it has also added supplier fraud detection to its existing workflows. However, it has not expanded much on what this entails. Other benefits of using ORO labs include:
- Provide an incredibly easy-to-use procurement front-end for business users
- Bring clarity and visibility into the end-to-end process for all stakeholders
- Reduce the time and manual effort to onboard and work with suppliers
- Give budget owners and finance, view into up-to-date spend pipeline and commitments
- Scale operations to meet legal, compliance, finance and regulatory requirements
Customers already include Optimizely, whose CEO Alex Atzberger is a board member, Iovance Biotherapeutics and a top pharmaceutical company. It also claims to serve the global 100 and some of the fastest-growing companies on its website. The pharmaceutical company is leveraging the ORO Labs platform to automate data flows for its source-to-pay process across multiple systems. It has applied a sophisticated risk model to ensure consistent execution of needed reviews and approvals across multiple geographic teams. This has helped the organisation to reduce supply chain risk while maintaining compliance.
Andy Shigo, head of procurement at Iovance Biotherapeutics, said, “ORO allows us to have a flexible solution to manage procurement front end processes including new procurement requests, supplier onboarding, and compliance checks. This will result in a more efficient and compliant process that will deliver savings and other value back into our business.”
Board members join
ORO has also added three new board members from the investors. Sean Jacobsohn, partner at Norwest Venture Partners and ORO Labs board member, commented, “Nobody has better insight on where the gaps are in today’s enterprise procurement systems than ORO’s founders. Their deep experience has given them a unique understanding of the pain points and a clear view of how to solve the problem that modern enterprises encounter when they need to acquire non-standard items or services. We’re always looking for that innate founder market fit, and it doesn’t get better than the triple threat at ORO Labs.”
Gabe Greenbaum, general partner at B Capital and ORO Labs board member, added, “There is a tremendous opportunity in supplier and procurement management software. ORO is bringing real innovation to the way companies manage their spend pipelines and supplier commitments, which is critical for decision and resource allocation initiatives. We have been impressed by ORO’s vision and product impact on Fortune 1000 customers and beyond, in such a short period of time.”
Ross Fubini, founder & managing partner of XYZ Venture Capital and ORO Labs board member, commented, “ORO enables business users to work rapidly with their vendors and suppliers, while following the compliance and smart workflows set out by procurement and legal teams. The team understands deeply the pain points for both of these stakeholders and where legacy solutions fall short.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
ORO Labs has certainly kept up a cadence of news in recent weeks. It will be interesting to see how it evolves in the coming months. Will its next move be to publish case studies around the companies listed above? It seems likely that Optimizely and Iovance Pharmaceuticals will be willing to take that step as stealth customers. This is just one area of marketing that ORO does need to invest in. The information on its website is light, and there is no mention or detail about the new fraud detection workflows.
Regardless, expect to hear more from ORO as it aims to solve a major challenge facing enterprises, supply chains.
