But despite competition from vendors like Keelvar and Focal Point, the startup appears to be doing just fine without imminent new lines of revenue. A recently introduced feature, intake-to-pay, provides extended capabilities like issuing purchase orders, invoice processing and payments.ĪI could become an area of growth for Zip. With Zip, Zaparde and Cheng built what they describe as an “intake-to-procure” solution that lets employees initiate a purchase that’s then routed for approval across finance, legal, IT, security and other teams and into enterprise resource management software. Previously engineers at Airbnb, Zaparde and Cheng say that they experienced firsthand how challenging it can be for employees to request a new business purchase, which often includes multiple complex steps like securing approvals and tracking progress from the request to the purchase itself being made. Zaparde and Lu Cheng, the company’s second co-founder, started Zip at the height of the pandemic in July 2020. “We believe there’s huge potential for AI in procurement to improve efficiency and synthesize insights that can make our customers’ lives easier.” “In the near term, we’re looking to add new AI-based capabilities to the Zip platform that will streamline the end-to-end intake-to-pay process,” Zaparde told TechCrunch in an email interview. Zip CEO Rujul Zaparde says that the financing, which values Zip at $1.5 billion, will be put toward “new applications of generative AI” and “encouraging adoption” across the startup’s customer base. Case in point, Zip, a startup developing procurement software, yesterday announced its $100 million Series C funding led by Y Combinator with participation from CRV and Tiger Global. The business of platforms for purchasing goods and services - in other words, procurement - is alive and well.

Zip intake to procure crunchbase