Procurement software company Archlet raises $2.8 Million to democratize data-based decision making in strategic sourcing

Zurich, Switzerland, January 20th, 2021. Archlet, the AI-based strategic sourcing platform, today announces that it has raised a Seed round of $2.8 million to fuel its growth. The investment was led by Munich-based Senovo and Berlin-based La Famiglia with participation from Nicolaus Schefenacker, David Nothacker and Julius Köhler, the founders of sennder. Existing investors Wingman Ventures, Flavio Pfaffhauser (Founder of Beekeeper) and Karin Hagen-Gierer (Chief Procurement Officer at Ardagh Group) also participated in the round.

Companies are under increasing pressure to create bottom line savings through their procurement departments while also incorporating non-price parameters in order to diversify risks, increase sustainability and improve supplier diversity. This pressure was greater than ever in 2020, when global supply chains were put under unprecedented stress due to the global pandemic crisis. However, existing sourcing software solutions are mainly focused on simple price analysis while being complicated to use, making sourcing a tedious experience for company buyers.

Archlet’s procurement technology enables buyers and category managers to quickly enter supplier negotiations backed by relevant data. The software frees buyers from manual, Excel-based offer analysis and guides them to the optimal award strategy in their sourcing events. It empowers buyers to include non-cost components such as sustainability, risk or diversity scores into the bid analysis and award decision. An easy-to-use interface combined with the ability to integrate into existing procurement workflows (e.g. with SAP Ariba) has helped Archlet take off.

“Today, Excel is still the go-to tool for buyers when it comes to collecting and analyzing supplier quotations. This makes sourcing processes intransparent, error-prone and manual. We are creating one central place where all the decision-relevant sourcing data is aggregated to support buyers in upcoming supplier negotiations with actionable insights”, says Tim Grunow, Co-Founder of Archlet.

Archlet’s customers operate across different industries and range from SMEs to large corporations in Europe and in the US, such as PepsiCo, Emmi, Deutsche Bahn and Stadler Rail. They report average  additional financial savings of up to 15% compared to previous purchasing activities, with an up to tenfold decrease in manual activities. In 2020, more than $10 billion in spending has been optimized through the Archlet sourcing platform.

“The procurement tech stack is due for an overhaul. Buyers want to unlock the potential of advanced analytics and intelligent automation but still lack a user-friendly tool to do so. With its intuitive end-to-end platform Archlet brings seamless, data-driven sourcing to every buyer in an organization. We are excited about the extent to which Archlet increases efficiency and facilitates financial savings for its customers. Above all, the team impressed us with their ambition, speed and ability to build a truly customer centric product”, says Mona Müller of Senovo.

Archlet was founded in 2019 out of a student consulting project by Lukas Wawrla, Jakob Manz, and Tim Grunow. The three founders met during their engineering studies at ETH Zurich. They were part of the student-led consulting company ETH juniors, where previously also founders of GetYourGuide, Beekeeper and Climeworks have made their first experiences in running a business.

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