Lio’s co-founders know firsthand that procurement — the process enterprises use to purchase services from vendors — is often a bottleneck. Vladimir Keil, the company’s co-founder and CEO, had experienced this problem as an employee inside a large company and then again while building his first startup.
“When we were selling enterprise software, we had to go through procurement ourselves and saw how manual and fragmented the process still is,” he told TechCrunch. Keil and his team have built an automated platform of AI agents — software that can complete tasks on behalf of humans — to help fix some of those fragmented processes.
On Thursday, Lio announced a $30 million Series A in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. SV Angels, Harry Stebbings, and YC also partook in the round (Lio was part of the Spring ’23 batch). The company has raised $33 million in funding to date. Keil said the fresh capital will be used to expand the company throughout the U.S. and increase the capabilities of Lio’s AI agents, which aim to complete the entire procurement process for enterprise customers.
Procurement is at the heart of enterprise spending, where companies look to buy everything from raw materials to professional services. Each purchase order requires focus and commitment: One usually has to open some type of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, check contract management systems, search the supplier database, run compliance checks, cross-reference budgets, dig through emails, and so on.
“Even with modern eProcurement software, most of the real work is still done manually,” Keil told TechCrunch. Companies are left to build large internal teams or outsource this work, resulting in a slow, expensive process. Keil had an idea — if the procurement process is largely unstructured data and repetitive workflows, then surely this is the type of task an AI agent is well-equipped to handle.
He teamed up with friends Lukas Heinzmann and Till Wagner and in 2023, the trio launched Lio, a virtual procurement workforce. Lio operates an AI-native platform with agentic infrastructure that completes the entire procurement process.
“Every previous generation of procurement technology was built on the same assumption, that humans will do the work and technology will help them do it faster,” Keil said. “We take a fundamentally different approach. Instead of building software to help humans do procurement work faster, Lio deploys AI agents that execute the workflow themselves.”
These Lio agents operate across and on top of enterprise systems to read documents, evaluate suppliers, negotiate terms, and complete transactions. “Processes that once took weeks can now be completed in minutes,” Keil said, adding that the startup is already helping companies manage billions in enterprise spend. “In one case, a global manufacturer was able to automate 75% of its previously outsourced procurement operations within six months.”
Lio is among the many companies that have popped up to completely redefine enterprise software, aided by agentic AI’s ability to fundamentally shift how enterprise application software operates.
Keil considers Lio’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 operations.
“Instead of spending most of their time processing requests and paperwork, teams can run more negotiations, analyze more suppliers, and capture savings opportunities that would otherwise be missed,” Keil said. “In the long run, we think this changes procurement from a back-office function into a much more powerful lever for enterprise performance.”
