Lio raises $30M from Andreessen Horowitz and others to automate enterprise procurement

Lio’s co-founders cognize firsthand that procurement — the process enterprises usage to acquisition services from vendors — is often a bottleneck. Vladimir Keil, the company’s co-founder and CEO, had experienced this occupation arsenic an worker wrong a ample institution and past again portion gathering his archetypal startup.

“When we were selling endeavor software, we had to spell done procurement ourselves and saw however manual and fragmented the process inactive is,” helium told TechCrunch. Kiel and his squad person built an automated level of AI agents — bundle that tin implicit tasks connected behalf of humans — to assistance hole immoderate of those fragmented processes.

On Thursday, Lio announced a $30 cardinal Series A successful a circular led by Andreessen Horowitz. SV Angels, Harry Stebbings, and YC besides partook successful the circular (Lio was portion of the Spring’23 batch). The institution has raised $33 cardinal successful backing to date. Keil said the caller superior volition beryllium utilized to grow the institution passim the U.S. and summation the capabilities of Lio’s AI agents, which purpose to implicit the full procurement process for endeavor customers. 

Procurement is astatine the bosom of endeavor spending, wherever companies look to bargain everything from earthy materials to nonrecreational services. Each acquisition bid requires absorption and commitment: One usually has to unfastened immoderate benignant of Enterprise Resource Planning, oregon ERP, software, cheque declaration absorption systems, hunt the supplier database, tally compliance checks, cross-reference budgets, excavation done emails, and truthful on. 

“Even with modern eProcurement software, astir of the existent enactment is inactive done manually,” Keil told TechCrunch. Companies are near to physique ample interior teams oregon outsource this work, resulting successful a slow, costly process. Keil had an thought — if the procurement process is mostly unstructured information and repetitive workflows, past surely this is the benignant of task an AI cause is well-equipped to handle. 

He teamed up with friends Lukas Heinzman and Till Wagner and successful 2023, the trio launched Lio, a virtual procurement workforce. Lio operates an AI-native level with agentic infrastructure that completes the full procurement process 

“Every erstwhile procreation of procurement exertion was built connected the aforesaid assumption, that humans volition bash the enactment and exertion volition assistance them bash it faster,” Keil said. “We instrumentality a fundamentally antithetic approach. Instead of gathering bundle to assistance humans bash procurement enactment faster, Lio deploys AI agents that execute the workflow themselves.” 

These Lio agents run crossed and connected apical of endeavor systems to work documents, measure suppliers, negociate terms, and implicit transactions. “Processes that erstwhile took weeks tin present beryllium completed successful minutes,” Keil said, adding that the startup is already helping companies negociate billions successful endeavor spend. “In 1 case, a planetary shaper was capable to automate 75% of its antecedently outsourced procurement operations wrong six months.” 

Lio is among the galore companies that person popped up to completely redefine endeavor software, aided by agentic AI’s quality to fundamentally shift however endeavor exertion bundle operates. 

Keil considers Lio’s competitors to beryllium bequest procurement bundle vendors (such arsenic SAP Ariba and Oracle), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers, and consulting firms that assistance companies with these operations.

“Instead of spending astir of their clip processing requests and paperwork, teams tin tally much negotiations, analyse much suppliers, and seizure savings opportunities that would different beryllium missed,” Keil said. “In the agelong run, we deliberation this changes procurement from a back-office relation into a overmuch much almighty lever for endeavor performance.”