Lio raises $30M from Andreessen Horowitz and others to automate enterprise procurement
Source: TechCrunch
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, experienced this problem both as an employee inside a large company and later 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,” Keil 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.
Funding round
On Thursday, Lio announced a $30 million Series A in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. SV Angels, Harry Stebbings, and Y Combinator also participated (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.
The procurement challenge
Procurement sits at the heart of enterprise spending, where companies buy everything from raw materials to professional services. Each purchase order typically requires:
- Opening an ERP system
- Checking contract‑management systems
- Searching the supplier database
- Running compliance checks
- Cross‑referencing budgets
- Digging through emails, etc.
“Even with modern eProcurement software, most of the real work is still done manually,” Keil told TechCrunch.
Companies often build large internal teams or outsource this work, resulting in a slow, expensive process. Keil’s insight was that the procurement workflow consists largely of unstructured data and repetitive steps—exactly the type of task an AI agent can handle.
Lio’s AI‑native platform
In 2023, Keil teamed up with Lukas Heinzman and Till Wagner to launch 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
- Complete transactions
“Processes that once took weeks can now be completed in minutes,” Keil added, noting 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.”
Market context and competitors
Lio is among the many companies that have emerged 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 (e.g., SAP Ariba, Oracle)
- Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers
- Consulting firms that assist with procurement operations
Impact on enterprise performance
“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.”