Venture Capital

ORO Raises $25 Million Series A

SAN FRANCISCOORO, an enterprise software platform that helps orchestrate end-to-end procurement across teams, has raised $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 t​he 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.”

Ross Fubini, founder & managing partner of XYZ Venture Capital, said “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.”