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Hi {{FIRST_NAME|readers}},

Two events worth flagging before we get to tonight's note.

Now. Something a bit different tonight.

A few weeks ago we ran a Q&A with Debadatta Dash on next-gen SAP Ariba. You loved it. Like, really loved it. So we're doing it again!

This time I sat down with Eldar Tuvey, Co-Founder and CEO of Vertice. Two cybersecurity exits totaling $600M+. And a very different lens on procurement than most founders in the space.

I wanted to understand what makes him tick, how he sees the market, and what he knows about software pricing that most procurement teams don't.

Let us know how you enjoy this one.

Onwards!

📰 In this week’s edition:

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A conversation about data moats, guaranteed savings, and why the procurement team is always at a disadvantage in the repeat game.

Eldar Tuvey is the Co-Founder and CEO of Vertice, the intelligent procurement platform processing $30B+ in direct and indirect spend across 30+ countries, with benchmarking data on 16,000+ vendors. Before Vertice, Eldar co-founded ScanSafe (acquired by Cisco, $200M) and Wandera (acquired by Jamf, $400M).

We recently sat down with him to get his take on the company, his journey and his thoughts on the ProcureTech market at large.

Q: You built two successful cybersecurity companies: ScanSafe and Wandera and exited both for a combined $600M+. You were deep inside the world of selling enterprise software. How does someone go from a cybersecurity company exit to building a procurement platform? Make this make sense…

Eldar: Honestly, I wanted to solve a problem I had running those two businesses... We grew very fast. We were selling a lot of software, but we were also buying a lot of software.

And we saw that just buying software, renewing it, trying to negotiate new purchases, it was such a drag. So difficult, so slow, and every single time there were increased costs because of more usage, more modules, more capabilities that we needed.

We also saw a huge variance in what we were paying compared to other founders I would talk to. It seemed like a broken process.

But the biggest thing? It was a drag on innovation and productivity. These wasted cycles, spending months trying to buy a new CRM or another tool, stopped us from moving fast. You want your best people building the company, not negotiating with vendors and running RFPs and testing software for months.

Q: And I’m guessing you had a unique vantage point because you were also selling software to thousands of customers? Could you see the pricing disparity from the vendor side too?

Eldar: Exactly. And I'm not proud of it, but we knew that some of our customers were paying five times more than another customer for the same thing. Because software's marginal cost is zero (or has been, until the AI age), the pricing swings are enormous.

Buy in Australian dollars? Cheaper. Come at the end of a quarter? The sales rep might discount more. Pay upfront? Different discount again. Sometimes you're a better negotiator, sometimes you're not, sometimes the sales rep is better, sometimes they're not.

All of these things lead to huge variations. There's sometimes a 10x difference between what customers pay for the exact same product.

Q: Ah so Vertice was born out of that frustration… So where this is all going from your vantage point...? What do you see the role of procurement morphing into over the next three to five years?

Eldar: I don't think teams will necessarily shrink much, but the skill sets will shift. I think procurement will rely more on outside parties for expertise, data sources, AI, and specialist agents for running certain functions.

Department heads and procurement leaders will need to really understand the latest technologies… have an in-depth view of their position on AI. What is good AI? How should they think about it? They need to identify automation opportunities, implement them across the department, and train people to get the most out of it.

And critically, procurement is going to need to leverage; insights exactly at the point of decision-making. Not in a report they read three weeks later… At the moment they're doing the approval, taking the next step.

Lastly, procurement leaders are going to need to be able to talk about business and technology. Understand their business intimately, but also understand technology intimately.

Q: You just mentioned data… Vertice has $3.4 billion (probably more by now) in negotiated spend data. What does that change in terms of what you're able to do, especially in the age of AI?

Eldar: AI functionality is something we've invested in very significantly over the last 24 months. It really helps us bring our proprietary data from all these negotiations together for customers.

Not just for software purchases… Software, hardware, telecommunications, and other indirect spend categories that our customers put on the platform, we see all of it. And then there's a network effect. Each new customer basically gets to share in that data (anonymized and private, obviously), so they understand where they rank relative to their peers.

AI is going to be super helpful in providing pricing intelligence, recommending actions, benchmarking against your peer group. It really helps you scale procurement judgment, by giving you insights exactly when you need them.

Now, I think Gen AI is a little bit overhyped right now… AI is never going to take over all of procurement responsibilities. But procurement-specific data and training is essential. The crux is the store of the data. You can't just run everything on generic AI, someone still needs to identify the demand. What does this organization actually need in terms of new tools, agencies, contractors?

Q: And that's a key distinction! An LLM sitting on top of publicly available internet data is going to give you an average answer; a reversion to the mean... But a finely-tuned LLM sitting on a proprietary dataset of 100,000+ actual negotiations... That’s something else entirely, right?

Eldar: We've done something like 100,000 different negotiations for our customers. We've got millions of data points on all of those. What works well, what doesn't. How long they take. Who the best person is to deal with. How many steps there are, how long between tasks, how long to get an approval.

We know everything about those negotiations. All the emails sent back and forth, all the Slack messages, all the Zoom transcripts. And we use that data, that knowledge gathered through trial and error over many years, to train our AI tools. So our customers essentially touch a button and have access to all of that insight for their own negotiations.

Interesting… There seems to have been market validation for this too? 13x revenue growth over two years. #2 on the Sunday Times 100 Tech 2026. What's been the biggest surprise in that growth journey? What’s been harder than expected?

Eldar: Great question. I've built two relatively successful businesses before. Both exited, one to Cisco, one to Jamf… I've never seen anything like it in terms of product-market fit. It's been spot-on from the moment we started.

We're solving a problem that everyone has. I've never gone to a customer who said "Oh no, everything's perfect. I don't need you." Perhaps they want to do it themselves. Perhaps they use a competitor. But I've never met a customer who says they don't have a problem.

In terms of what's working, we have a great team, and you add AI on top and you get 5x productivity.

What's harder than expected? Competition has never been fiercer. A lot of new entrants, well-funded, which makes the competition intense. But that keeps you on your toes.

And finding talent is hard. We're growing so fast that we continuously need to grow the team, specifically procurement specialists who understand vendors intimately. That's a scarce resource.

Q: Let's talk competitive advantage. You've mentioned data, team quality, the vendor touch points. Does Vertice have another unfair advantage?

Eldar: Yes, and as you mention, a few things come together.

First, the data. We have something like 16,000 vendors in our database with live pricing benchmarks and negotiation playbooks for each one.

Our AI tools are trained on all of this real-world procurement, tens of thousands of contracts, something like a million human-to-human email and call interactions. All updated in real time.

Second, the visibility we have into a customer's entire tech stack. Their complete indirect procurement spend, usage, duplications, risk from vendors. That total understanding of their processes and inefficiencies gives us a real edge.

Third, and this is the one I'm most proud of, predictive pricing. Not just historical benchmarks, but forecasting what a customer can expect to pay. We've seen so much data that we can forecast very accurately where their spend is going to go. If a customer knows where their spend will be in the next 12 months or three years, they can adjust accordingly. See it sooner, act faster, make better decisions.

And all of it is supported by our specialist procurement experts. We still believe in humans. AI tools cut out manual work, automate tasks, speed things up, and can make connections across your entire spend that a human might miss. But the human relationship with customers, that's still critical.

Q: And then there's the “repeat game”, right? When a customer is dealing with Salesforce, they do it once a year, maybe once every three years. You're dealing with Salesforce how often?

Eldar: Twenty to thirty times a week. We understand exactly how they work. They understand how we work. It makes the process so much easier.

The customer is always at a disadvantage because of the repeat game. They're doing it once every three years. We're doing it constantly.

Q: And am I mistaken or in certain engagements, you actually guarantee savings? That's pretty bold in an industry full of empty promises. How does that work?

Eldar: Because we can forecast so accurately, we can offer customers a multiple of our fee in guaranteed savings. We give them a 3x, 4x ROI on what they're paying us.

CFOs and CPOs know they're going to generate hard ROI with a minimum guarantee, and they're confident to proceed. We've not really ever had to rebate a customer because we just over-deliver.

We sell outcomes, not aspirations. Everyone's been talking about how AI needs to price on outcomes and not on seats… That's what we've been doing for four years. We guarantee savings, and if we don't deliver, they get their money back.

When you're selling to procurement and finance, that's what builds confidence in my opinion.

Q: Shifting to a question our newsletter audience might have... A lot of CPOs and procurement leaders are reading this and evaluating tools. What questions should they be asking vendors that most people don't think to ask?

Eldar: Three things.

First: adoption. How will they ensure business users and procurement users actually adopt the tool? Because they're different user groups... Understanding adoption is key.

Second: integrations. What native integrations do they have? Slack, Teams, SSO, ERPs, which tools in your existing stack can they actually connect with? That's absolutely critical.

Third: innovation roadmaps. Are these guys going to be there for me as the market changes? I've been around the block and I've never seen the market move this quickly. You need belief that your vendor is going to be able to cope with the changes, that they'll innovate, that they've historically delivered on their roadmap. If they've done it in the past, you can assume they'll continue.

Q: On integration specifically, every customer is a "world first" in the sense that they all have different system combinations, different configurations, custom field usage. How does Vertice handle that complexity?

Eldar: Out of the box, we have a huge number of integrations: ERP systems, CLM, ticketing systems, HRIS. We have open APIs for syncing data across all these systems and flexible data mapping. We have an integration layer that scales with our customers and orchestrates across all of these disconnected systems.

For a younger company establishing itself, being able to work with the existing tools that customers have is crucial. We've not come across a customer yet who's told us about a system that we can't integrate with in some way.

Q: Do you need a systems integrator (SI) to deploy Vertice?

Eldar: Absolutely not. We have an onboarding team to support customers, but most of them just get going by themselves after a bit of training. It's super intuitive. And if they need help, we're there.

Q: Coming back up for air from the weeds, what's the biggest misconception that even experienced procurement professionals still get wrong about deploying or leveraging technology?

Eldar: It's about making end users' lives easier. Making the team more efficient and insight-led so they can make better decisions.

But in terms of misconceptions, I think process and policy alone don't deliver the value. You need relationships and softer skills where you can really build those relationships with your preferred vendors and actually deliver a better result.

For most of our customers, it's all about growth. They want to grow fast, and procurement is absolutely strategic in enabling them to have the best tools with the right capabilities to build their businesses.

So in my mind, it's not just about enabling process. It's also about enabling relationships.

Q: To that end, you’ve redesigned the intake process in your tool recently, haven’t you? Can you talk about that?

Eldar: One of the key things we did is make our intake form available on a simple URL. Most of our customers promote it to all employees, anyone can start a procurement request.

The intake itself is dynamic. It doesn't ask unnecessary questions. It can be conversational with AI. It's available in Slack and Teams. We're trying to make ourselves absolutely accessible, be the front door, but make it super easy.

And we put insights directly into the intake. If you're asking to buy a license for something that already exists, we tell you. If there's a better alternative, we tell you. We show you how often we see it, whether you have budget, everything we know, right at the beginning of the process, not at the end.

Q: Which could potentially bypass the procurement process entirely, right? "We already have licenses for your need. Just use that!”

Eldar: Exactly. It's all conditional routing. If we've already got it, it doesn't go to procurement. Below a certain spend level, doesn't go to procurement. Low risk (we give risk scores for all vendors), doesn't need the same review. But it’s all according to your own business rules.

We embed all of the insights at the beginning of the process and at the relevant points across the whole workflow. Better decisions made, better outcomes delivered.

Q: Finally, what would you tell folks who have a traditional procurement background, who’ve done their CIPS or other certifications, and have stayed in their lane with “procurement domain expertise”, what's the move now?

Eldar: Get up the learning curve. There's an explosion in procurement tech happening right now. So many new entrants, so much innovation. I've never seen the ecosystem this active. It's definitely gathering steam, and my advice to everyone is: it's time to layer in digital expertise. The people who do will be the ones leading the function in three years.

Q: So to “bite into the fruit of technology”, if you haven't already 😅
Eldar, thanks for sharing your thoughts with our newsletter readers.

Eldar: Thanks for having me!

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