Eliminating complexity is music to most Chief Procurement Officers’ ears.
In a world with so much uncertainty, efficiency is king. And for Vertice’s founders and brothers Eldar and Roy Tuvey, simplifying procurement is at the heart of everything the duo believes in.
Indeed, their company Vertice is on a mission to remove obstacles and barriers in order to simplify procurement. Today’s procurement teams need a smart, agile framework that orchestrates all aspects of purchasing with precision. Armed with accurate data, real-time pricing benchmarks and deep insights into the best solutions, CPOs can be sure that the decisions they make are as informed as possible. According to Eldar and Roy, procurement platforms have so far failed to unite procurement leaders’ requirements into a single seamless platform.
This is where Vertice comes in. The company is aiming to become the integrated backbone of the procurement and finance stack, empowering its customers to scale effortlessly and efficiently. By eliminating friction, Vertice enables organisations to focus on growth and innovation while maintaining full, transparent control over their financial processes and procurement spend.
In an exclusive article with CPOstrategy, Eldar Tuvey, CEO of Vertice, talks us through why simplifying procurement via a unified orchestration layer enriched by data and insights supports better, faster buying decisions.
Briefly introduce us to Vertice. What, for you, differentiates it from other companies in this space?
Eldar Tuvey: “Vertice is the only spend optimisation platform that enables businesses to simplify their procurement workflows, gain granular control and visibility of their spend, and realise cost savings of as much as 30%.
“It is the only solution that combines SaaS spend management, procurement workflows and cloud spend optimisation under one roof. Because of this, we can provide a full spend management service to our customers, helping them combat rising business costs.”
What are the biggest problems you are aiming to solve for procurement?
Eldar Tuvey: “When we founded Vertice, we built it to last. From day one, we knew that capital discipline and taking back control of inefficient spending were always going to be important to businesses regardless of the economic landscape. Today, that focus on smart procurement is more prevalent than ever before which has been accelerated by high-profile news such as Elon Musk’s US government ‘DOGE’ and the UK government’s commitment to cutting costs.
“While scrutiny of spend has increased, the ability to drive real savings hasn’t kept pace. Businesses operate globally. Vendors are multiplying, and they often have overlapping capabilities. Buying is increasingly decentralised. Data remains fragmented while actionable insights are rare. This all undermines the core goals of best practice procurement: control, visibility and transparency.”
Can you tell us about the journey of Vertice? Since being founded in 2021, what have the past few years been like?
Eldar Tuvey: “It’s been incredible to see the rapid growth of Vertice as a business, but also the rapid success we’ve delivered for our customers. We now manage over $3.4 billion of software, cloud and direct spend for high-growth customers in over 30 countries and we are rapidly growing across the US, Europe and APAC. We’ve helped our customers achieve an average of seven times ROI and saved them millions of hours of employee time, and we’re just getting started.
“When my brother Roy and I founded Vertice in 2021, we saw the opportunity to solve an urgent problem in the market – SaaS spend was soaring out of control. With procurement and finance leaders feeling enormous pressure on SaaS costs, plus a combination of our product development, our excellent negotiation service and our fiercely independent stance, we grew phenomenally quickly, establishing ourselves across US, Europe and APAC in only two years – and earning a track record of routinely delivering extraordinary 30% cost reductions.
“We then noticed an opportunity to expand this approach into cloud costs – finance and procurement’s next biggest cost worry. Then, we added a cloud cost optimisation service that creates a single, shared view of cloud costs for both finance and procurement and their IT and cloud colleagues. We run continuous optimisation tests and help businesses make the right financial and technical decisions to reduce costs – again with an average of 30% reductions.
“Both of these showed us the importance – and underperformance – of procurement workflows. We therefore launched Intelligent Workflows, a procurement orchestration tool that brings automation and intelligence to the purchasing process. It eliminates manual approval routing and re-routing, anticipating bottlenecks, and reducing the daily workload for procurement teams – all while improving control and speed of outcomes. It’s the boost procurement teams need to ease the manual burden upon them.
“It’s a game-changer for the procurement industry, and we are already seeing results. Customers are now halving their approval cycle times and doubling purchasing compliance savings just from how they conduct procurement workflows.
“Crucially, we have integrated all three of these areas into a single offering. The market’s current response is fragmented with disparate point solutions tackling procurement workflows, contract negotiation, benchmarking data and Saas spend optimisation in isolation. But Vertice has become a leader in procuretech via an alternative approach and delivers a range of capabilities through a single, unified platform.”
How would you describe the past few years in procurement as a result of the influence of tools such as GenAI and LLMs? And are we actually seeing the true value of it yet?
Eldar Tuvey: “We’re seeing GenAI and LLMs begin to impact procurement in data analysis and content generation (in contracts and negotiations), but it’s not a mature area yet.
“Automation is what’s providing true and tangible benefits right now. Accelerating the whole process, reducing the manual effort required in each stage, ensuring better alignment and buy-in from stakeholders – this is transforming modern procurement.
“We conducted a recent survey of over 300 global procurement leaders and found that those with modern, robust automation within their procurement processes are 29% faster at bringing new services and products to market, and are 32% more able to implement new initiatives. Procurement automation empowers business performance.”
What are the biggest considerations that CPOs need to think about when seeking to use automation as a business strategy in procurement?
Eldar Tuvey: “Introducing automation to your procurement strategy has obvious benefits, across multiple areas including compliance, speed to market, and budget control. But it’s not as simple as bringing it in and watching it immediately improve your setup.
“Automation needs to be introduced strategically. If it is integrated into a setup where deployment is still manual, unsophisticated, and is lacking in data hygiene, centralisation or even access, then it won’t be much help.
“Getting your ducks in a row is essential before introducing automation. Otherwise, you’re building from uneven foundations that will restrict your growth and become even trickier to fix down the line.”
In your view, what is the best way procurement professionals can make more data-driven decisions?
Eldar Tuvey: “The biggest obstacle to data-driven decision-making is simply not having ready access to data in the first place. There is so much data available to procurement teams in terms of price benchmarks, contract terms and supplier information. But it’s laborious and complicated to extract for teams that are already time-poor.
“Even if they do have internal data, this might not be representative of the whole industry. If, for example, your original contract was 30% over the normal standard price, and you renewed at a 10% discount, you’re still unknowingly paying 20% more than standard. Access to wider industry data requires a lot of research or costs a significant amount to purchase from a third party, often without context.
“This is why Vertice has information from over 16,000 global vendors to provide an unbeatable array of data points that customers can analyse to make better procurement decisions and negotiate more effectively.”
How do you retain good people and encourage them to join/stay with Vertice?
Eldar Tuvey: “People are at the heart of Vertice, and the Vertice team is our greatest asset. Nothing makes me happier than witnessing a young hire with drive and a bit of experience progress over the years. I love seeing them manage significant partnerships or lead teams. Reflecting on how far they’ve come since they first joined us is incredibly rewarding.
“And we keep them by constantly growing Vertice. The business has such large potential – and we’ve grown so rapidly – and this is down to the drive, expertise and commitment of our people. Everyone plays an active part in doing so and they can see their own impact before their very eyes – that’s really rewarding and makes working here so attractive.”
Anything exciting you’d like to share? Any announcements?
Eldar Tuvey: “Vertice is currently enjoying phenomenal momentum. We have grown by more than 13x in two years, now managing more than $3.4 billion of software, cloud and direct spend for customers across more than 30 countries. “We are excited to be celebrating our next milestone – a $50m Series C funding round from Tier 1 investors Lakestar. This funding will allow us to open new offices, triple our engineering team and accelerate our product development – all single-mindedly geared towards our mission to make procurement simpler, unified and enriched by data and insights that support better, faster buying decisions.”
