Lio's co-founders know firsthand that procurement, the process companies use to purchase services from vendors, is often a bottleneck. Vladimir Keil, the company's co-founder and CEO, experienced this problem first as an employee at a large company and later while building his first startup.
“When we were selling enterprise software, we found that we had to do the procurement ourselves and the process was still manual and fragmented,” he told TechCrunch. Keel and his team built an automation platform of AI agents (software that can complete tasks on behalf of humans) to fix some of the fragmented processes.
On Thursday, Rio announced it had secured $30 million in Series A funding in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. SV Angels, Harry Stebbings, and YC also participated in this round (Rio was part of the Spring '23 team). The company has raised $33 million in funding to date. Keil said the new funding will be used to expand the company across the United States and improve the capabilities of Lio's AI agents aimed at completing the entire procurement process for enterprise customers.
Procurement is at the heart of corporate spending, with companies looking to purchase everything from raw materials to professional services. Each purchase order requires focus and commitment. This typically involves opening up some type of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, checking contract management systems, searching supplier databases, running compliance checks, cross-referencing budgets, sifting through emails, and more.
“Even with the latest eProcurement software, most of the actual work is still done manually,” Keil told TechCrunch. Companies must build large in-house teams or outsource this work, making the process slow and expensive. Keil had an idea. If a large part of your procurement process is unstructured data and repetitive workflows, this should definitely be the type of task that an AI agent can 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 agent infrastructure that completes the entire procurement process
“Previous generations of procurement technology were all built on the same premise: humans do the work, and technology helps them do it faster,” Keil said. “We are taking a fundamentally different approach. Instead of building software that allows humans to do procurement tasks faster, Lio deploys AI agents that run the workflows themselves.”
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These Lio agents operate across and on corporate systems, reading documents, evaluating suppliers, negotiating terms, and completing deals. “Processes that once took weeks can now be completed in minutes,” Keil said, adding that the startup is already helping companies manage billions of dollars in corporate spending. “One global manufacturer was able to automate 75% of previously outsourced procurement functions within six months.”
Lio is one of many companies emerging to completely redefine enterprise software by harnessing the power of agent AI to fundamentally change the way enterprise application software works.
Keil believes Lio's competitors are traditional 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 conduct more negotiations, analyze more suppliers, and capture savings opportunities they would otherwise have missed,” Keil said. “Longer term, we believe this will transform procurement from a back-office function to a more powerful lever for enterprise performance.”