Ignite Procurement's Sigbjørn Nome and Børge Langedal turned away a number of investors when they recently landed NOK 8 million for their spend management tool solution for procurement.
Press: Sigbjørn Nome and Børge Langedal had worked as consultants in BCG, where they repeatedly saw how there was great potential for better analyses in the procurement area. They envisioned how they could automate much of the work that today was done manually and lengthily by either purchasing departments or consultants like themselves.
They started to build a strategic platform for procurement that would eventually get giants such as OBOS, AF Gruppen, Autostore, Implenia and a number of others as customers, and which has now raised NOK 8 million. On the investor list are SNÖ with 5 million kroner, Arkwright X with 2 million kroner and Investinor with one million.
A Startup That Self-Financed its Way to Success
The company has been developed on an entrepreneurial level and without external investments so far. The founders worked as consultants and financed the way forward to the first customers. They also focused on creating at first, a simple solution for their own use, to eventually make it available to the market a year ago.
"It not only financed the development of the platform, but it also validated the potential for automating the work we did in BCG," says CEO Sigbjørn Nome.
A Solution to Automate Analysis
Ignite spend management solution retrieves data about the suppliers and what kind of relationship the buyers have with these players. Ignite then calculates the various suppliers’ risk profiles using accounting information and other factors to produce a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of each supplier to reveal any unknown risk in continuing with a certain supplier, or to know if there's room for improvements.
It is not just about identifying risk, but also opportunities, Nome believes.
You can read the full article here: Shifter: Selvfinansiert innkjøpsplattform ble investoryndling (article in Norwegian).
