ORO Raises $25 Million in Series A Funding to Reimagine Procurement
Product leaders from SAP Ariba deliver smart composable workflows to radically simplify decentralized purchasing, orchestrate supplier onboarding and management; ORO platform also adds supplier fraud detection to its existing workflows
SAN FRANCISCO – Nov. 3, 2022 – ORO, a modern enterprise software platform that helps orchestrate end-to-end procurement across teams, today announced $25 million in Series A funding co-led by Norwest Venture Partners and B Capital, with participation from XYZ Venture Capital and additional funding from Array Ventures and other investors. ORO was founded by three former product leaders at SAP Ariba to bridge the disconnect between the modern enterprise’s need for agile, decentralized purchasing and the requirement for controls and compliance checks. The funding will be used for hiring across all roles to accelerate delivery and deployment of the company’s recently announced Smart Procurement Workflows.
ORO’s founders Sudhir Bhojwani, Lalitha Rajagopalan, and Yuan Tung tapped their deep experience building enterprise procurement products at SAP Ariba to uncover a unique insight: today’s spend pipelines look very different from the commodity-based systems of the past. This shift required a ground-up rethinking of how procurement workflows need to empower employees and make it easy to onboard and work with suppliers.
The result is ORO’s Smart Procurement Workflows, and the new funding is already being used to expand how organizations can apply these robust workflows to improve procurement and supplier efficiency. A top pharmaceutical company has adopted one of these workflows to manage its global source-to-pay process for supplier payment updates. That new workflow automates data flow across multiple systems and applies a sophisticated risk model to ensure consistent execution of needed reviews and approvals across multiple geographic teams. The result is a streamlined, auditable process that reduces risk and ensures compliance.
“Nobody has better insight on where the gaps are in today’s enterprise procurement systems than ORO’s founders,” said Sean Jacobsohn, partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “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.”
According to Gabe Greenbaum, general partner at B Capital, “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.”
Notes Ross Fubini, founder & managing partner of XYZ Venture Capital, “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.”
Modern companies are decentralized and move fast. The need for speed conflicts with controls and compliance checks. The adaptable, composable workflows in ORO deliver agility and transparency to:
• 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.
ORO’s Smart Procurement Workflows are already deployed with mid-market and enterprise customers, including Optimizely, Iovance Biotherapeutics and others.
“ORO allows us to have a flexible solution to manage procurement front end processes including new procurement requests, supplier onboarding, and compliance checks,” said Andy Shigo, head of procurement, Iovance Biotherapeutics. “This will result in a more efficient and compliant process that will deliver savings and other value back into our business.”
Procurement can be easy and efficient for all employees. To learn more about how ORO’s Smart Procurement Workflows make it happen, click here to set up a demo today.
About ORO
ORO procurement automation platform dramatically improves traditional procurement operations by taming the chaotic enterprise spend on business-critical purchases and supplier engagements. ORO’s smart procurement workflows help organizations increase business agility by making it easy for employees to start, manage and build supplier relationships. ORO is founded by the former product leaders of SAP Ariba (Sudhir Bhojwani, Lalitha Rajagopalan and Yuan Tung); to learn how ORO is helping organizations respond faster to business needs and market conditions, visit www.orolabs.ai.
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“ExxonMobil is uniquely placed to understand the biggest opportunities in improving energy supply chains, from more accurate sales and operations planning, increased agility in field operations, effective management of enormous transportation networks and adapting quickly to complex regulatory environments,” John Sicard, Kinaxis CEO, said in a release.
Specifically, Kinaxis and ExxonMobil said they will focus on a supply and demand planning solution for the complicated fuel commodities market which has no industry-wide standard and which relies heavily on spreadsheets and other manual methods. The solution will enable integrated refinery-to-customer planning with timely data for the most accurate supply/demand planning, balancing and signaling.
The benefits of that approach could include automated data visibility, improved inventory management and terminal replenishment, and enhanced supply scenario planning that are expected to enable arbitrage opportunities and decrease supply costs.
And in the chemicals and lubricants space, the companies are developing an advanced planning solution that provides manufacturing and logistics constraints management coupled with scenario modelling and evaluation.
“Last year, we brought together all ExxonMobil supply chain activities and expertise into one centralized organization, creating one of the largest supply chain operations in the world, and through this identified critical solution gaps to enable our businesses to capture additional value,” said Staale Gjervik, supply chain president, ExxonMobil Global Services Company. “Collaborating with Kinaxis, a leading supply chain technology provider, is instrumental in providing solutions for a large and complex business like ours.”
However, that trend is counterbalanced by economic uncertainty driven by geopolitics, which is prompting many companies to diversity their supply chains, Dun & Bradstreet said in its “Q4 2024 Global Business Optimism Insights” report, which was based on research conducted during the third quarter.
“While overall global business optimism has increased and inflation has abated, it’s important to recognize that geopolitics contribute to economic uncertainty,” Neeraj Sahai, president of Dun & Bradstreet International, said in a release. “Industry-specific regulatory risks and more stringent data requirements have emerged as the top concerns among a third of respondents. To mitigate these risks, businesses are considering diversifying their supply chains and markets to manage regulatory risk.”
According to the report, nearly four in five businesses are expressing increased optimism in domestic and export orders, capital expenditures, and financial risk due to a combination of easing financial pressures, shifts in monetary policies, robust regulatory frameworks, and higher participation in sustainability initiatives.
U.S. businesses recorded a nearly 9% rise in optimism, aided by falling inflation and expectations of further rate cuts. Similarly, business optimism in the U.K. and Spain showed notable recoveries as their respective central banks initiated monetary easing, rising by 13% and 9%, respectively. Emerging economies, such as Argentina and India, saw jumps in optimism levels due to declining inflation and increased domestic demand respectively.
"Businesses are increasingly confident as borrowing costs decline, boosting optimism for higher sales, stronger exports, and reduced financial risks," Arun Singh, Global Chief Economist at Dun & Bradstreet, said. "This confidence is driving capital investments, with easing supply chain pressures supporting growth in the year's final quarter."
The firms’ “GEP Global Supply Chain Volatility Index” tracks demand conditions, shortages, transportation costs, inventories, and backlogs based on a monthly survey of 27,000 businesses.
The rise in underutilized vendor capacity was driven by a deterioration in global demand. Factory purchasing activity was at its weakest in the year-to-date, with procurement trends in all major continents worsening in September and signaling gloomier prospects for economies heading into Q4, the report said.
According to the report, the slowing economy was seen across the major regions:
North America factory purchasing activity deteriorates more quickly in September, with demand at its weakest year-to-date, signaling a quickly slowing U.S. economy
Factory procurement activity in China fell for a third straight month, and devastation from Typhoon Yagi hit vendors feeding Southeast Asian markets like Vietnam
Europe's industrial recession deepens, leading to an even larger increase in supplier spare capacity
"September is the fourth straight month of declining demand and the third month running that the world's supply chains have spare capacity, as manufacturing becomes an increasing drag on the major economies," Jagadish Turimella, president of GEP, said in a release. "With the potential of a widening war in the Middle East impacting oil, and the possibility of more tariffs and trade barriers in the new year, manufacturers should prioritize agility and resilience in their procurement and supply chains."
The third-party logistics service provider (3PL) Total Distribution Inc. (TDI) is continuing to grow through acquisitions, announcing today that it has bought REO Processing & REO Logistics.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but REO Processing & REO Logistics is headquartered in West Virginia with 10 facilities across West Virginia in Parkersburg, Vienna, Huntington, Kenova, and Nitro as well as in Atlanta, GA.
Headquartered in Canton, Ohio, TDI is a wholly owned subsidiary of Peoples Services Inc. (PSI). The combined TDI and PSI businesses operate over 12 million square feet of contract and public warehouse space located in 65 facilities in eight states including Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida.
As an asset-based 3PL, the PSI network offers a range of specialized material handling and storage services including many value-added activities such as drumming, milling, tolling, packaging, kitting, inventory management, transloading, cross docking, transportation, and brokerage services.
This latest move follows a series of other acquisitions, as TDI bought D+S Distribution, Inc. and Integrated Logistics Services Inc. in May, and Swafford Trucking, Inc., Swafford Warehousing, Inc., and Swafford Transportation, Inc. in February. The company also bought Presidential Express Trucking, Inc. and Presidential Express Warehousing & Distribution, Inc. in 2023.
The freight equipment original equipment manufacturer (OEM) Wabash will use a federal grant to launch a project with the University of Delaware that will save electricity by incorporating lightweight solar panels into refrigerated trailers and truck bodies, the Indiana company said today.
The three-year project, set to begin next year in partnership with the University of Delaware’s Center for Composite Materials, is intended to play a pivotal role in making zero-emission mid-mile transportation a commercially viable option, Wabash said.
Those materials are important because batteries powering heavy trucks can weigh between 5,000 to 10,000 pounds, often limiting the payload capacity and drawing significant energy from the electrical grid when charging, the partners said.
“This project has the potential to revolutionize refrigerated transport by reducing reliance on the electrical grid and minimizing overall emissions,” Michael Bodey, director of technology discovery and innovation at Wabash, said in a release. “While many of today’s zero-emission products focus on tailpipe emissions, they still draw power from energy grids, which often rely on non-renewable sources. Our goal is to offer a truly green solution—a well-to-wheel approach—that accounts for the full life cycle of energy consumption, from production to usage.”