TEL-AVIV, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Approve.com, the modern procurement platform, today announced that it has completed a $5 million seed round led by Aleph, an early venture capital investor, whose founding partners previously led investments in Wix, Lemonade, Monday.com, Houseparty and more. The funding will be used for innovation and global expansion. Approve will establish US operations, invest in growth for its R&D team, and support new and existing accounts.
Using a lightweight cloud-based platform, Approve leverages automation to standardize and streamline the procurement process, empowering organizations to increase operational efficiency, cost savings, and visibility and control over business spend.
As companies look to scale and move away from the disarray of ad-hoc emails and spreadsheets, Approve delivers employees, budget owners and vendors the ability to seamlessly collaborate and provide procurement managers greater control and visibility into the entire operation. When integrating Approve, companies enjoy a lightweight solution focused on automating business spend while enforcing proper procurement policies. Approve functions as a front-end for your financial organization.
“Before Approve, I founded a B2B swag management platform,” says Bar Winkler, Co-founder and CEO of Approve. “Within two short years, we grew the business to $2M in sales with over 200 enterprise customers. Throughout that journey, I saw first hand the struggle legacy ERP solutions created. A market in dire need of a cultural shift, we set out to build a seamless, SaaS-based platform that would use smart automation to ensure transparency, collaboration and efficiency, all while helping to scale enterprise companies and put them firmly on the path towards digital transformation.”
The legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) ecosystem and existing enterprise procurement solutions suffer from fragmented tooling, broken communication and siloed data. This results in lengthy processes laden with unnecessary errors, and missed saving opportunities. Whereas, Approve reduces the buying cycle by 50 percent, cuts supply costs by 10 percent and lowers processing costs by upwards of 60 percent.
“Digital transformation (DX) is reshaping procurement organizations' business processes, employees’ work, and business outcomes globally. Smart businesses have turned their focus to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-enabled procurement software because they need flexible and agile applications that are relatively easy to implement, configure, and update while also bringing in the latest innovation,” according to IDC1 . As businesses large and small embark on their journey to the cloud, the demand on procurement applications to ease this transition becomes even greater.
Approve’s SaaS platform creates custom automated workflows that streamline requests, orders and vendor onboarding. It plugs directly with existing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions and securely syncs with real-time budgets. There is a searchable vendor database that includes updated business information and spend volume as well as a unified dashboard that organizes all procurement-related data in one place. Approve also eliminates the friction when paying vendors with built-in payments that work for any vendor type.
“Procurement is a neglected field with huge opportunity for innovation,” said Eden Shochat, Equal Partner at Aleph. “Approve has created a tool that allows procurement teams, be more efficient, informed and in a collaborative manner ultimately resulting in significant cost savings. The ease of use is key here, along with the automation and integration the platform offers. Approve works with legacy solutions organizations may already have, transforming a deeply entrenched industry almost immediately.”
About Approve.com
Approve is a procurement operations platform that helps businesses streamline purchasing workflows and vendor interactions, and gain critical insights into company spend. Approve introduces automation to procurement operations and frees up managers to focus on strategic initiatives, while providing a seamless user experience that drives collaboration and adoption. Approve transforms procurement processes in modern companies and was built to be highly scalable while providing a seamless usage experience to employees, budget owners and vendors.
Find more information here: https://approve.com/ or check us out on Facebook and LinekdIn.
1Worldwide Procurement Applications Software Market Shares, 2018: Cloud Leads the Way, June 2019, IDC, Doc # US45183019
