Earlier this year, a major French tech company began requiring an email to be sent to the CEO for every purchase over €1,000. This is because they did not have the right tool to manage purchases.
he meets the hub, a new French startup that wants to overhaul spending management solutions. Pivot wants to work with startups that are growing quickly and feel they need a procurement solution. Instead of choosing 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’ll find three experienced co-founders. Roman Lebo He was one of the first employees at Swile and most recently served as chief product officer at the French unicorn. Marc Antoine Lacroix He spent several years working at Qonto as CTO and then Chief Product Officer. Estelle Jolly He has been a workflow engineer for several enterprise companies and for Wave.ai.
“I worked a lot on operations at Swale, especially on all the internal tools. I actually saw a sequence where we first tried to get as many customers as possible, so we first focused on all the tools for our go-to-market strategy and sales – mainly Salesforce. So, You have a lot of customers, and you want to keep them happy. “So we organized our customer service, our customer success team,” Roman Lebo told me.
He added: “And then you reach the final building block, which is how successful you are in managing all your financial flows.” This is where Pivot comes into play.
When companies appoint a head of procurement, this person usually begins by listing all requirements and issues an invitation to bid. Typically, they have to choose between the purchasing component of Oracle NetSuite or perhaps… Cuba. After that, it takes several months to integrate the product into 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 United States, zoom And Level path Both have raised tens of millions of dollars. “There are some regional advantages and European advantages when it comes to compliance and the payment ecosystem,” Lebo said.
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 $5.3 million in a pre-seed round (€5 million) from several venture capital firms (Visionaries, Emblem, Cocoa, Anamcara, Financière Saint James) as well as entrepreneurs and investors like Loïc Soubeyrand (founder of Swile). Steve Anafi (co-founder of Qonto), Hanno Renner (co-founder of Personio), Olivier Samwer (co-founder of Rocket Internet), Pierre Labrie, Alexis Hartmann, and Alexandre Beresch.
Things were progressing very quickly. Following this funding round in April, the company began developing the product over the summer and launched it in September with its first customer — Voodoo.
“We’re taking off gradually, because, as I always tell our team, there’s more speed and less speed. But we’ll end the year with about ten customers. We’ve got the deals, but we don’t want to rush anything,” Lebo said.
Purchase order workflow for humans
If you work in a large company and frequently fill purchase orders, you know that it is a painful process. There are too many fields, you’re not sure what you’re supposed to type in each field, and you’d rather find a workaround to avoid purchase orders.
Pivot understands this well and has designed a tool that makes the purchase order workflow less painful. Administrators can set up workflows right from the Pivot interface – no programming skills required. For example, a very large purchase with a software vendor may trigger a security review, IT review, 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 technology stack. It fetches the company’s organizational chart for approval workflow from HR system, retrieves budgets from Pigment, Anaplan, etc. It then connects with your communication tools, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Jira.
Naturally, Pivot integrates with ERP software (NetSuite, SAP…) so vendors, cost centers, compliance rules and more are deployed instantly as soon as a purchase order is validated.
Many companies waste time on approvals and endless workflows. Pivot wants to add a layer of spend management without slowing down teams. The timing seems appropriate as many companies are reviewing how they spend money.