Lio raises $30 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others to automate enterprise purchasing processes

Liu’s founders know firsthand that procurement — the process organizations use to purchase services from vendors — is often a bottleneck. Vladimir Kil, the company’s co-founder and CEO, faced this problem when he was an employee within a large company and then again while building his first startup.

“When we were selling enterprise software, we had to do the purchasing ourselves and see how manual and fragmented the process still is,” he told TechCrunch. Keil and his team have built an automated platform for AI agents — programs that can complete tasks on behalf of humans — to help fix some of those fragmented processes.

Leo on Thursday announced a $30 million Series A in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. SV Angels, Harry Stebbings and YC also participated in the tour (Lio was part of the Spring’23 batch). The company has raised $33 million in funding to date. Kyle said the new capital will be used to expand the company across the United States and increase the capabilities of Lio’s AI agents, which aim to complete the entire purchasing process for enterprise customers.

Procurement is at the heart of enterprise spending, as companies look to purchase everything from raw materials to professional services. Every purchase order requires focus and commitment: one usually has to open some type of enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software, check contract management systems, search the supplier database, perform compliance checks, reference budgets, search emails, etc.

“Even with modern e-procurement software, most of the real work is still done manually,” Kyle told TechCrunch. Companies have to build large internal teams or outsource this work, resulting in a slow and expensive process. Kyle had an idea – if the purchasing process was largely unstructured data and a repetitive workflow, then surely this was the type of task an AI agent would be well-equipped to handle.

He teamed up with friends Lukas Heinzman and Till Wagner and in 2023, the trio launched Lio, a virtual procurement workforce. Lio operates a native AI-driven platform with an agent infrastructure that completes the entire purchasing process

“Every previous generation of procurement technology has been built on the same assumption, which is that humans will do the work and technology will help them do it faster,” Keil said. “We’re taking a radically different approach. Instead of building software to help humans do purchasing faster, Lio deploys AI agents that execute the workflow themselves.”

These Lio agents work across and on top of enterprise systems to read documents, evaluate suppliers, negotiate terms, and complete transactions. “Processes that previously took weeks can now be completed in minutes,” Keil said, adding that the startup is already helping companies manage billions in enterprise spending. “In one case, a global manufacturer was able to automate 75% of the purchasing processes it had previously relied on overseas within six months.”

Liu is among the many companies that have emerged Completely redefine enterprise softwareessentially aided by the ability of agentic AI to do this Changing how enterprise application software works.

Kyle considers Liu’s competitors to be legacy procurement software vendors (such as SAP Ariba and Oracle), business process outsourcing (BPO) providers, and consulting firms that help companies with these processes.

“Instead of spending most of their time processing orders and paperwork, teams can conduct more negotiations, analyze more suppliers, and seize savings opportunities that might otherwise be missed,” Keil said. “In the long term, we believe this changes procurement from a back-office function to a more powerful tool for enterprise performance.”