Enterprise procurement remains one of the last bastions of manual back-office administration.
The world’s largest enterprises spend billions each year to manage their procurement functions – directing the flow of trillions of dollars in spend. And all of this occurs one email, one PDF, and one labor-intensive negotiation at a time. If you’ve ever had to procure anything within a large enterprise, you know this problem. Somehow, purchasing an office table results in hours of work, painful SAP data entry, and endless email ping-pong – and it still takes weeks. Business users hate the process: as organizations grow, their procurement headcount scales linearly with spend complexity. Procurement teams are buried in administrative work: just to keep up, companies are forced to either hire massive internal teams or outsource to BPOs. And despite constant cost pressure, companies still struggle to capture savings or negotiate effectively.
This problem persists because purchasing is one of the few workflows that touches nearly everyone in the enterprise – spanning a maze of systems, policies, and approvals. Every request, whether it’s a six-figure services engagement or basic office furniture, triggers rules, SOPs, exceptions, and handoffs across intake, sourcing, negotiation, fulfillment, invoicing, payment, and compliance.
Enter Lio.
Lio turns procurement from a necessary cost center into a source of strength, delivering a virtual procurement workforce for enterprises at machine speed.
When customers see the demo, they’re immediately taken aback by a level of automation that few believed software could achieve. Employees can now complete a purchase in just two clicks – bringing the simplicity of consumer buying into enterprise procurement. Lio’s agents triage requests, analyze quotes, compare suppliers, negotiate, source and onboard vendors, and execute purchases end-to-end across ERPs, systems of record, inboxes, contracts, and the open web.
The proof is in the purchase order. Lio collapses weeks of work into minutes. More than 100 clients globally, including Fortune 500 companies across industries, are already using Lio to manage billions in spend and replace outsourced labor with AI, resulting in:
- 85 percent reduction in manual work for procurement buyers
- 10 percent additional procurement savings
- 95 percent adoption rates
- 100 percent customer retention
Vlad, Lukas, and Till are technical and maniacal founders obsessed with rethinking procurement for an agent-first world. Vlad is an immigrant with a chip on his shoulder: he has been launching businesses since grade school after migrating from Kazakhstan. He met Lukas at Germany’s top technical university, who, at the time, was building a computer vision-based robot lawnmower. One of Lukas’s former managers told us how he outperformed entire teams of people when he was a part-time intern at Audi. Rounding out the trio is Till, who is not only a ninja at navigating enterprise, but also once topped a Computer Science final while in a hospital bed after an appendectomy.
We’re thrilled to partner with them and the rest of the Lio team as they scale this vision.
Welcome to the future of procurement.
-
Seema Amble is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she focuses on investments in B2B software and fintech.
-
James da Costa is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on investing in B2B software and financial services.
-
Eric Zhou is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on companies building at the application layer in Generative AI.
- Follow
-
Brian Roberts is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he works with the American Dynamism and AI Apps funds.
- Need for Speed in AI Sales: AI Doesn’t Just Change What You Sell. It Also Changes How You Sell It.
- Investing in Stuut: Automating Accounts Receivable
- The Greenfield Strategy: AI-native startup Bingo
- The AI Application Spending Report: Where Startup Dollars Really Go
- The Rise of Computer Use and Agentic Coworkers
