Procurement is painful, so Pivot wants to simplify it

Earlier this year, a big French tech company started requiring an email to the CEO for every purchase above €1,000. That’s because they didn’t have the right tool to manage procurement.

Meet Pivot, a new French startup that wants to overhaul spend management solutions. Pivot wants to work with young companies that are growing fast and feel like they need a procurement solution. Instead of picking a legacy business spend management system from an ERP vendor, Pivot wants to be the first (and last) procurement system for these companies.

At the helm of the startup, you will find three experienced co-founders. Romain Libeau was one of the first employees at Swile and more recently acted as the chief product officer for the French unicorn. Marc-Antoine Lacroix has spent several years working for Qonto as the chief technology officer and then chief product officer. Estelle Giuly has been a workflow engineer for several enterprise companies and for Wave.ai.

“I worked a lot on operations at Swile, and especially on all the internal tools. I actually saw a sequencing where first we tried to get as many customers as possible, so first we focused on all the tools for our go-to-market strategy and sales — basically Salesforce. Then, you have a lot of customers, and you want to keep them happy. So we structured our customer service, our customer success team,” Libeau told me.

“And then you get to the last brick, which is how well you manage all your financial flows,” he added. And that’s where Pivot comes in.

When companies hire a head of procurement, that person usually starts by listing all the requirements and issues a call for tenders. Usually, they get to choose between Oracle NetSuite’s procurement component or maybe Coupa. It then takes several months to integrate the product in the company and procurement teams feel like they are only using 10% of the feature set.

Pivot isn’t the only startup trying to improve procurement. In the U.S., Zip and Levelpath have both raised tens of millions of dollars. “There are some regional features, European features when it comes to compliance and the payment ecosystem,” Libeau said.

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But the fact that some American startups are thriving also proves that there is a real market opportunity. That’s why Pivot has already raised a $5.3 million pre-seed round (€5 million) from several VC firms (Visionaries, Emblem, Cocoa, Anamcara and Financière Saint James) as well as entrepreneurs and investors such as Loïc Soubeyrand (founder of Swile), Steve Anavi (co-founder of Qonto), Hanno Renner (co-founder of Personio), Oliver Samwer (co-founder of Rocket Internet), Pierre Laprée, Alexis Hartmann and Alexandre Berriche.

And things have been advancing at a very rapid pace. After this funding round in April, the company started developing the product over the summer and launched it in September with a first client — Voodoo.

“We’re rolling out gradually, because, as I always tell our team, more haste, less speed. But we’re going to end the year with around 10 customers. So we’ve got the deals, but we don’t want to rush into anything,” Libeau said.

A PO workflow for humans

If you work for a big company and you often fill out purchase orders, you know that it’s a painful process. There are too many fields, you’re not sure what you’re supposed to write in each field and you would rather find a workaround to avoid purchase orders.

Pivot is well aware of that and has designed a tool that makes the PO workflow less painful. Admins can set up workflows from Pivot’s interface directly — no coding skills required. For instance, a very large purchase with a software vendor might trigger a security review, an IT review, a legal review, etc. That’s why Pivot is betting on third-party integrations and an interface that works for everyone.

Pivot integrates directly with your existing tech stack. It fetches the company’s org chart for the approval workflow from the HR system, it retrieves budgets from Pigment, Anaplan, etc. It then communicates with your communication tools, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Jira.

And, of course, Pivot integrates with ERP software (NetSuite, SAP…) so that vendors, cost centers, compliance rules and more are instantly propagated once a purchase order is validated.

Too many companies waste time in approvals and endless workflows. Pivot wants to add a layer of spend management without slowing down business teams. And the timing seems right, as many companies are reviewing how they spend money.