SpendHound: Giving power back to procurement

Today, the role of procurement is increasingly challenging. 

Leaders are being asked to unlock greater value, and often with fewer resources. 

It is a key reason why SpendHound was created – to give procurement teams the data, leverage, and confidence they need to shape purchasing decisions proactively.

SpendHound is a SaaS spend management platform that helps companies understand what they should be paying for software and AI. Companies use SpendHound to gain visibility into their technology investments, track renewals, and benchmark vendor pricing against peer organisations. As a subsidiary of YipitData,

SpendHound leverages benchmarking insights across more than 10,000 software and AI vendors to help organisations optimise spend, negotiate from a position of strength, and maximize their investments.

Tom Ruello, VP, GTM at SpendHound, explains that what his organisation has found is that procurement teams don’t necessarily have the resources to optimise spend but are asked to save a lot of money on their bottom lines. “What we’ve done is essentially flipped the model on its head, unlike other companies that will charge a lot of money and then struggle with really fast growth,” he discusses. “We have created a model where we provide a product that is 100% free for companies with less than 1,000 employees. For those companies with more than 1,000 employees, we charge just a $10,000 a year flat fee with a guarantee of $150,000 of savings. 

“The nice thing about the model is that it has allowed us to grow really quickly. In two and a half years, we’ve grown to more than 1,200 customers and now we’re close to 100% growth year over year. That growth has built this unique, proprietary benchmarking data set that gives power back to procurement. With access to stronger, democratised spend data, procurement gets that strategic voice internally within their business and improves their results.”

Becky Martins, VP Marketing at SpendHound, adds that it feels like a “no-brainer” to leverage SpendHound because of the low barrier of entry. “We have an amazing data set that is generated from real contract and peer spend data, which is what people want rather than just the sticker price from a vendor,” affirms Martins. “It’s something that I believe we do better than anyone else on the market.”

Martins affirms she has lots of ‘empathy’ for buyers because of the tension and conflict they are forced to deal with. “It’s a really tough job,” she admits. “You have a strategic charter, managing supplier relationships, spend visibility and other things that the business depends on, but yet you’re often measured from a savings and budget variance perspective only, and you really don’t have all the tools that you need to be successful.”

Ruello and Martins were speaking to us at DPW New York, where this year’s conference theme was ‘Recode’ which is the idea of redesigning how procurement and supply chain operates today. With this in mind, Martins believes that, given the transformation happening within procurement, this could be the function’s defining moment. She argues that this is where tools like SpendHound are on hand to help procurement leaders navigate change and deliver more value to their organisations. 

“At SpendHound, we want to be the ones to arm procurement leaders with actionable intelligence and defensible benchmarks so they can be more strategic thought partners to the business,” adds Martins. “Being honest, you can’t just get a seat at the table – you really have to earn it. The way in which you do that is being that default person that the organisation goes to at the beginning of a negotiation cycle instead of at the end, because you have the intelligence, insights and benchmarks that no one else has so you can guide the negotiation process in as strategic a way as possible.”

Ruello agrees with Martins and asserts that Recode is about essentially redefining how procurement actually operates and eradicating legacy ways of thinking. “There’s a bit of a moment in time right now where every single company’s talking about AI and trying to implement new agents,” he explains. “The reality is that companies are hiring fewer procurement people. Recode is that opportunity to think about how we can make sure we’re doing things in a way that’s going to provide that seat at the table so that we can be strategic drivers within the business. Candidly, it’s also about ensuring we’re not going to be replaced by those AI agents that everyone’s trying to sell to us.”

The noise around AI is loud. Attend any procurement conference and the dominant topic of conversation will revolve around various forms of AI and the opportunities it can unlock.

For Ruello, he admits the buzz is real but explains that the technology is only as good as the foundation it is built on. “A lot of companies aren’t necessarily investing heavily in building those foundations,” he says. “Everyone wants the impact and the value of the platform on top, but they’re not willing to invest in what’s actually required.” 

“There are two key pieces to that. Firstly it’s about the way that you clean your data. At SpendHound, we do that. We clean up all of your software data and provide a clean view of exactly what you’re spending money on. Then the other piece of that is enriching AI with other types of data and we think of SpendHound as very much a data company. We provide data and insights to power those agents to feed any of your AI processes you have in place. We’ve recently built an MCP server so we can push data to any AI platform you’re using to provide that flexibility. The reality is you’ve got to be making moves because the space is going to change whether you do or don’t.”

Find out more about SpendHound here.