DPW hosted their semi-finalist demo competition for Growth stage track ($1 – $10M in ARR) companies on June 23. There were ten terrific companies presenting for the opportunity to pitch their offering for judges at the Grand Finale DEMO 2022 at DPW Amsterdam 2022 in September. (DPW is hosting a demo competition for Early stage track companies as well.) Procurement companies can compete to showcase their tech-forward innovations every year at DPW (Digital Procurement World), which is an event that introduces and helps funnel new ideas into procurement. What is interesting for supply market professionals/researchers is that many of the startups involved are utilizing exciting fresh ways of integrating quality supplier and market risk data to help form intelligence at a pace not seen before.
The finalists selected for the Growth stage track are Certa (San Francisco), Craft.co (San Franciso), and Sastrify (Germany). The competition lasted for one and a half hours and each company had three minutes to pitch and then another three minutes were allotted for the judges to ask questions.
Ilya Levtov, Co-founder and CEO of Craft, stated they are the most advanced (and accurate) supplier intelligence solution in the market and that a majority of supplier analytics are insufficient, poor, or not comprehensive. Craft utilizes artificial intelligence and integrates with over 25 partners to provide holistic supplier insight to prevent risk.
Certa’s presenter, Patrick McConville, explained how Certa provides a risk holistic view by providing a single source of truth. Certa provides a low code/no code platform that allows procurement teams to easily automate their processes without the need for IT support and integrates with a company’s enterprise ecosystem.
Compared to other types of spend, IT procurement is an entirely different animal. Co-founder Sven Lackinger covered how Sastrify addresses the unique needs of procuring enterprise SaaS subscriptions by saving buyers time and significantly reducing spend. They offer pricing benchmark data, in addition to license and renewal management.
The other semi-finalists were DeepStream Technologies, EIVEE, Global Sustainable Enterprise System (GSES), Kodiak Hub, Per Angusta, SHIPSTA, and SourceDay.
Overall, with a couple exceptions, supplier risk management was a consistent theme during the competition, along with simplifying the initial discovery and onboarding of suppliers and integrating key components of the sourcing process into smooth and efficient workflows.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
