Coupa Acquires Cirtuo, Enhances AI-Powered Spend Management Platform

Coupa Inspire 2025 - new agents pave the way to autonomous collaborative commerce

Spend management vendor Coupa today unveiled several new AI agents and other components towards its mission to create an autonomous fabric for enterprise buying and selling. In a product keynote at the company's Inspire conference in Las Vegas, Salvatore Lombardo, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Coupa, set out how these new agents are designed to immediately reduce manual effort through automation, while at the same time building towards the ultimate goal of fully autonomous procurement. Briefing diginomica in advance of today's news, Lombardo adds that Navi, which made its debut at last year's Inspire as an AI assistant, now takes on an expanded role as the entry point to the platform's agentic AI capabilities. He explains: Navi is the front door, the face of the agents... Navi will be the autonomous agent of the future, and it is done by adding intelligent agents underneath, which always will be the ones giving the right answer depending on the question you enter... The platform itself has completely, as we are born-in-cloud, [made] a very quick turnaround into an agentic layer we are building, where Navi is the face and the future engagement layer. Today's agent announcements include two new supply chain agents built on the supply chain design and planning product which grew out of Coupa's acquiaition of supply chain network design vendor Llamasoft five years ago. Currently in trials with early access customers, one helps to model supply chain networks, while the other is designed to help designers stay up-to-date with the intricacies of building supply chain digital twins, models and scenarios. Three further AI agents are now generally available. An initial analytics agent generates custom data tables or simple charts in response to natural language requests -- a more proactive analytics agent is already in the works, says Lombardo. A document discovery agent can now surface documents that are awaiting approval. And an upgraded knowledge agent is able to provide instant answers to questions about organization-specific policies governing sourcing and spend. More agents are on the roadmap in areas such as sourcing and supplier onboarding, and customers can also plug in third-party agents and assistants running on external platforms. Other new AI-powered capabilities include transaction summaries, which surface critical information from requisitions, sourcing events, service sheets, and invoices; payment alerts to flag up anomalies and potentially risky payments; and process health insights, which identify underperforming approval workflows. Of equal importance in laying the foundations for a future autonomous procurement network are an expanded set of supplier collaboration capabilities. Complementing the existing collaboration around purchase orders and forecasts, there is now the ability to collaborate on inventory, with suppliers able to monitor stock levels at customer warehouses, helping to reduce safety stock levels and carrying costs. Further areas of collaboration will follow in future releases. Lombardo explains: If the supplier is successful, the buyer is... That's why I'm so keen and I accelerated the offering of supply chain collaboration, because I see there's so much value that I'm offering tools on both sides to collaborate in the cloud. This is a much deeper collaboration than was possible in past generations of e-commerce technology, he explains, when networks of buyers and sellers were simply matching transactions. He goes on: If you now add all of this as connected, all in the cloud, and then you have suppliers and buyers working in the same application for certain value creation -- quality collaboration, for example -- then the e-commerce becomes really collaboration commerce. That's why I believe very much that we have the technology now to make it happen. But the immediate task is to build customer confidence in the agent technology that Coupa is rolling out. A key foundation for reliable AI agents is to have a trusted mapping of an organization's processes, and the policies and conditions that govern them. To this end, Coupa is introducing a product called Smart Intake & Orchestration. This is a tool that allows customers to map and refine their business process workflows, and which then orchestrates how those workflows are executed in the Coupa platform. Lombardo believes this will give customers confidence that, when they deploy agents, the agents will follow the documented workflows. He explains: [I'm] saying, 'Hey, the first step is, do and model your business process management with us -- the orchestration. You can still put a simple UI on top, but the point is, AI and the agents will learn from the process management steps you are doing. So whatever the agent needs to execute, they will take your [process] data. He is also being careful to only release agents to general availability once they have proven their ability to do the job. The Coupa agent platform uses a variety of built-in internal test mechanisms to check the validity of every agent response before passing it back to the user. If it fails the tests, the agent tells the user it can't provide an answer. This protects customers from misleading information, but users aren't happy if an agent keeps on coming up blank. So before going to general availability, an agent's pass rate has to be above the 75-80% level. That takes a lot of additional training, says Lombardo, but it's necessary if the agent is to provide a good user experience. The vision that Lombardo mapped out when we first met last year -- shortly after he had joined Coupa -- is already beginning to take shape. There's a lot of ground still to cover, but the upgrade of Navi to become the access point for agent capabilities, the acceleration of supplier collaboration, the emphasis on mapping and refining business processes, and the growing family of agents, all add up to a coherent master plan for moving towards that autonomous network for collaborative commerce. The challenge is to keep customers moving along the roadmap, which means ensuring they can find value in the tools Coupa is able to put in their hands along the way. Their reaction at Inspire this week will be telling.

Coupa Inspire 2025 - Coupa acquires Cirtuo to bring AI smarts to buyer category management

Spend management vendor Coupa yesterday announced it has acquired Cirtuo, described as "an industry leader in AI-powered category management." This is Coupa's first acquisition after it was taken private two years ago by PE giant Thoma Bravo. Category management is an often highly manual or ad-hoc process in which buyers analyze and plan sourcing and procurement. Briefing diginomica ahead of the news, Leagh Turner, CEO of Coupa, tells us the acquisition is really about strengthening its offering in strategic sourcing. She explains: Let's stop calling it category management. What it really is, is strategic sourcing through to validation in one system, meaning: 'What are my options? How do I prioritize them? Under what conditions would they need to be true? Once I execute on them, did I make the right decisions?' That's what we're trying to do. Applying Cirtuo's AI-based digital system brings the ability to do that analysis in real time and dynamically respond to changing circumstances. She goes on: During a time of volatility, every single one of our customers is saying, 'I don't want to do category management episodically. What I want to do is strategic category management, strategic thinking and validating of my strategic thought, in near-real time against my full buyer business process. Can I do that?' And the answer in Coupa was, not really. So we're effectively buying, I'll call it a thin slice of technology and some really good skills to be able to enhance that side of our business process. Cirtuo, based in Croatia, has built up a blue-chip customer list including names such as aluminum manufacturer Ball Corporation, brewer Molson Coors, pharmaceutical giants Johnson & Johnson and Novartis, snack food company Utz Brands, and retail giant Walmart. Its AI-driven solution helps buyers digitally manage sourcing and procurement, by supporting categorization and analysis of their spend strategies and supplier selection. Among the customer testimonials quoted in Coupa's press release, Walmart's Michael DeWitt, VP of Indirect Spend Management & Center of Excellence, sums up the attraction. He comments: Cirtuo greatly enhances the category strategies that we're developing. Cirtuo follows best practices and helps us to be more strategic and get us out of the tactical execution that we are stuck in. It's easy to use. It's a no-brainer. While this is Coupa's first acquisition since going private, Turner says that the company is looking at other potential acquisition targets, particularly on the supplier business process side, as part of its roadmap towards fully automating sourcing and spend by creating an agentic network for collaborative commerce. She adds: This is a company with a ton of liquidity. We can go out and make acquisitions. We're ready and willing and able to do that, but only those that allow us to pull off that vision of being the future of trade, and a network that enables buyers and suppliers to come together and act autonomously. And if we can do that, we're going to buy up good technology and good people. To coincide with the vendor's annual Inspire conference this week in Las Vegas, it has announced new agents, advances in supplier collaboration, and other steps towards that vision of autonomous collaborative commerce. The goal is to eliminate much of the inefficiency and duplicated effort that occurs in global trade today -- a half-trillion-dollar opportunity, says Turner, quoting McKinsey research on the extent of that inefficiency among both buyers and sellers. She believes Coupa is uniquely placed due to the agreements it has in place with the overwhelming majority of its customers to share data. She explains: If you're going to apply an agentic workforce to a data flow, you actually need to have access, use rights, to that data. That is a unique advantage at Coupa, which is 19 years of trusted use of data, servicing accurate recommendations, [with] no external data, therefore the data integrity is very high, and 100% access rights. What is the data? The data is contracts, purchase orders, sales orders, goods receipts, delivery notices, across global multinationals who have traded with 10 million suppliers over the course of a 19-year period. So there's patterns everywhere. That is an advantage in a world where there will be a blurring of jurisdictional lines across these agents -- and the only thing that matters for those agents is the basis of knowledge. The higher quality data you can train them on, the faster they get smart and capable of making good decisions. At a time when AI is blurring the traditional boundaries between enterprise applications, she believes Coupa's data access gives it an unparalleled opportunity to deliver its vision of a platform where autonomous agents will collaborate on behalf of both buyers and sellers. She elaborates: if you think about it, what will we have in the future? The application layer will thin out. The data will continue to grow. Ours compounds by about $1.3 trillion a year. We will have an agentic layer that simply works across that growing data store to surface recommendations to both sides of the network. That's all we'll do. Those recommendations will be made based on matching conditions -- preferences on one side, preferences on another. Preferences can be regulations, they can be price, they can be quantity, they can be jurisdiction. But based on those preferences, those agents will know what's available, and we'll be able to match. That's the direction that we're headed. We think we're super uniquely qualified to be able to do it, because we have $8 trillion worth of training information for those agents. Go to any enterprise tech vendor event these days and you'll hear about their plans for agentic AI. But the scope and detail of Coupa's plans are exceptional. It's a stark contrast with the dynamic at last year's Inspire, when Turner had the task of introducing herself as the recently appointed CEO at this previously founder-led vendor. This year, she and her leadership colleagues have returned with an ambitious plan for Coupa's future, and a commitment to invest in acquisitions and continued product development to make it happen.

Coupa Acquires Cirtuo to Add Category Management to Spend Management Platform | PYMNTS.com

Coupa said Tuesday (May 13) that it has acquired Croatia-based Cirtuo to accelerate its roadmap for autonomous spend management. The acquisition adds Cirtuo's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered category management to Coupa's AI-native spend management platform, Coupa said in a Tuesday press release. Cirtuo's solution helps procurement teams craft holistic category strategies, leverage supplier relationships and manage strategic savings, supplier and risk mitigation initiatives, according to the release. Integrating this solution into Coupa's platform will create a unified system that will support the full supplier strategy lifecycle -- including strategy planning, execution and monitoring -- and help procurement teams drive cost reduction and gain a deeper understanding of business needs, per the release. "We're investing heavily in GenAI to automate routine tasks, enhance strategic decision-making and bring autonomous procurement to market," Coupa Chief Product and Technology Officer Salvatore Lombardo said in the release. "With the acquisition of Cirtuo, we strengthen our AI-native solutions and fill a critical gap in Coupa's Strategic Sourcing Suite." Cirtuo CEO Drasko Jelavic said in the release: "Cirtuo empowers procurement teams to build AI-guided, insight-driven strategies that align with business priorities and flow directly into tactical activities resulting in seamless, closed-loop procurement processes." Coupa said in February that it added 100 new features, including agentic AI ones, to its spend management platform. The new features included contract intelligence designed to improve contract language analysis and process more contracts, and Rapid Network Explorer to accelerate the generation and analysis of supply chain scenarios. "Every product release brings us closer to Coupa's vision of a fully autonomous spend management future," Lombardo said at the time in a press release. "Agentic AI will play a central role in making our collaborative global trade network grow." Businesses are adopting AI-powered solutions to transition their legacy back-office processes, such as accounts payable (AP), from passive operations to value creation levers, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and Coupa collaboration, "Smart Spending: How AI Is Transforming Financial Decision Making." The report found that 38% of U.S. chief financial officers at large enterprises are actively using AI in their AP programs, and an additional 43% are interested in integrating AI across AP but have not yet done so.

Coupa Acquires Cirtuo, Leader in AI-Powered Category Management By Investing.com

Cirtuo's technology will unlock the full potential of AI-powered category management and sourcing, accelerating Coupa's autonomous spend management vision and roadmap FOSTER CITY, Calif., May 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Coupa, the leader in AI-native total spend management, today announced it has acquired Croatia-based Cirtuo, an industry leader in AI-powered category management. This strategic investment accelerates Coupa's autonomous spend management vision and underscores Coupa's commitment to developing AI-powered solutions that improve productivity, agility, and resilience while delivering margin impact. Category managers are under mounting pressure to align procurement strategies and initiatives with enterprise priorities such as sustainability, risk mitigation, and innovation. Recognizing the widening gap between strategic planning and tactical buying, organizations are turning to AI-enabled solutions to bridge productivity and efficiency gaps. By integrating Cirtuo's AI-enabled category management capabilities with Coupa's leading Total Spend Management platform, Coupa is set to deliver a comprehensive solution that seamlessly translates robust, data-driven strategies into sourcing pipelines, supplier actions, and savings realization. This includes supporting the full supplier strategy lifecycle, from strategy planning, to execution, to monitoring, all within a unified system. These new capabilities will help procurement stakeholders not only drive cost reduction and cost avoidance, but extend to deliver a deeper understanding of business needs. "Transforming the end-to-end procurement process requires reimagining technology's role. We're investing heavily in GenAI to automate routine tasks, enhance strategic decision-making, and bring autonomous procurement to market," said Salvatore Lombardo, Coupa Chief Product and Technology Officer. "With the acquisition of Cirtuo, we strengthen our AI-native solutions and fill a critical gap in Coupa's Strategic Sourcing Suite. This allows us to deliver a comprehensive category management solution where customers can create margin impact, especially in direct spend categories, by integrating analysis, strategy, and execution in one place." "Cirtuo empowers procurement teams to build AI-guided, insight-driven strategies that align with business priorities and flow directly into tactical activities resulting in seamless, closed-loop procurement processes," said Drasko Jelavic, Cirtuo CEO. "We're excited to join Coupa as businesses embrace digital transformation in the AI era." Making Category Strategies Actionable Cirtuo's market leading category management solution continues to be recognized for its pioneering technology by procurement practitioners, technology experts, and customers. Key solutions include: As a leader in AI-powered category management, Cirtuo has helped some of the world's biggest and best global brands create real business impact, including Ball Corporation, B.Braun, Molson Coors, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Utz Brands, Walmart, and more. Customers are saying: Attendees at Coupa's flagship annual event, Inspire, will have a chance to learn more about the power of combining Coupa and Cirtuo from Cirtuo's CEO Drasko Jelavic at a dedicated breakout session and in the Expo Hall. Learn more about cirtuo.com and coupa.com. Learn more about how you can master spend and cost management without sacrificing growth. Kaizen Equity Partners served as financial advisor to Cirtuo. Kirkland & Ellis and Wolf Theiss served as legal counsel to Coupa. About Coupa Coupa is the leader in AI-native total spend management. Using its trusted, community-generated, $8 trillion dataset, Coupa brings autonomous AI agents, a network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers, and leading apps together on one unified platform to seamlessly automate the buying process and connect to customers in a whole new way. With Coupa, you'll make margins multiply™. Learn more at coupa.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X (Twitter). About Cirtuo Cirtuo is the pioneer in digital category management and strategy creation. Based on the original consulting blueprint for category management and refined in countless client workshops, Cirtuo distills the insights from hundreds of category strategies across global and local procurement organizations and spend categories into one digital consultant: Cirtuo Guided Strategy Creation™ Pro. Cirtuo supports over 5,000 category managers of leading national and multinational companies like Siemens Energy, Boeing, Walmart, Novartis, Molson Coors, or British Telecom across industries and 40+ countries in creating business-centric and actionable category and supplier strategies that deliver unparalleled impact and value.