How Zip is Leading the Procurement Orchestration Revolution

Zip is on a mission – to help businesses procure with the fastest process, the least risk, and at the best value. Founded in 2020 by former Airbnb product leaders Rujul Zaparde and Lu Cheng, Zip aims to create one front door for procurement, making it an effortless experience that delivers unmatched value to businesses worldwide.

At its core, Zip streamlines the procurement orchestration process, simplifying intake, sourcing, vendor management, purchase orders, AP automation, and global payments, while offering a single entry point for employees to make purchase requests. This integrated approach streamlines the entire procurement lifecycle, from initial request to final payment, thereby saving businesses valuable time and money, while enhancing spend visibility, risk management, and compliance.

Headed up by its CEO, Rujul Zaparde, the company is already 300 strong and in the midst of a recruitment drive, hiring more than ever in its history, from engineering to customer support and implementation delivery. The company is also seeing rapid growth in the EMEA market, having just opened an office in London to support its growing EMEA customer base — which includes Arm, a global semiconductor and software design company; Monday.com, a leading work operating system; and N26, an innovative digital bank. 

"I'm most excited about how we now serve hundreds and hundreds of leaders from companies like OpenAI, Snowflake, Prudential, Sephora, Reddit and others, these well-regarded companies and brands across really every sort of vertical and industry out there," Rujul shares.

Orchestration: A vital tool for modern procurement

Rujul and Cheng founded Zip having seen pain points in the procurement process during their time working as product leaders at Airbnb. To their great surprise, they soon discovered that most, if not all, global businesses were experiencing similar issues.

Rujul explains that over the last decade, two significant changes have occurred in the world that have led to the need for a solution like the one Zip provides. First, buying has become much more distributed, with people in sales, marketing and engineering empowered to make purchases. Second, the review of spend has become much more cross-functional. 

“It's not just about the dollars and the cents today,” Rujul explains. “I think every CPO would agree that their job is almost equivalently, if not more, about management of risk. With decentralisation, we have more infrequent users of procurement processes, making intuitive UI crucial. You can't train thousands of people, whose job is not procurement, on all of the steps involved. This means the purchasing process is currently slow, complex, and riddled with inefficiencies, involving countless steps, extensive paperwork, and numerous approvals and security reviews.” 

“Having a really crystal clear and strong workflow capability to manage the complexity of the end-to-end procurement process across all the different teams and stakeholders becomes a lot more critical in a world where buying has become distributed,” Rujul continues. “That's the problem Zip solves.”

Rujul believes the most important thing offered by Zip’s orchestration platform is its cross-functional nature. Zip’s approach to orchestration simplifies collaboration for everyone involved — from procurement and sourcing teams to end users, as well as cybersecurity, IT, compliance, privacy, and finance departments.

Every year, Zip facilitates millions of comments across its customer base, as users collaborate within the platform. “They're commenting, they're tagging each other,” Rujul notes. “The role of procurement is cross-functional more than any other function, and that's what makes and elevates intake and procurement orchestration.”

For orchestration to be at its best, Rujul also believes the process starts with an intuitive intake, which Zip calls the front door. This makes it straightforward for any employee in the organisation to begin a purchase request.

Rujul explains. “It should be intuitive, guiding users without requiring policy documentation and only asking relevant questions based on what they’re buying.”

Rujul concludes, “Zip guides you to capture the request correctly and then makes it very clear visually what the actual orchestration process looks like, what the downstream workflow looks like, and where your request sits at any moment in time between all of the cross-functional teams and systems involved in the process.”

Why people come to Zip

Zip is seeing daily demand for its relatively new process, with global enterprises across sectors — including big tech, financial services, retail, manufacturing, and healthcare — all looking to elevate their procurement practices. Rujul identifies two major concerns that drive people to Zip:

The first is perhaps the expected answer, which is that people want earlier visibility into their spending, to give them more leverage in driving savings. 

“If you find out earlier when someone is contemplating doing something, then you can redirect them to an existing supplier with Zip's AI,” Rujul explains.

“You find the right supplier, drive leverage and negotiation, there are so many benefits to getting involved earlier.”

The second issue is compliance and auditability. Zip addresses the lack of auditable records in most companies by automating stakeholder involvement and creating a singular, auditable record across the organisation. It also allows customers to configure specific security assessments for certain situations, like hiring contractors, to ensure compliance and eliminate human error in following complex policy documents — helping companies to prevent oversights and providing a clear, auditable record of security reviews for things like site access. 

“This automated, always-available tracking is a core value driver for our customers,” Rujul says. 

How Zip is leveraging AI

Like the majority of the sector, AI is having an impact on the way Zip operates. However, Zip's approach to AI focuses on concrete, usable solutions rather than theoretical or abstract applications. This year, Zip unveiled a powerful suite of AI capabilities that eliminate thousands of employee hours previously spent on manual tasks, saving money and freeing up time for innovation.

One of these innovations is the Zip AI assistant. This AI-powered tool guides employees through the entire purchasing journey, simplifying complex policy documentation and allowing users to chat directly about policies or make purchase requests. Another key feature is the "AI document extraction" capability. This advanced tool can parse data from various forms and agreements, creating a comprehensive single source of truth. 

Finally, Zip’s ‘AI intake automation’ feature enables quick processing of purchase orders by automatically extracting and filling out information from uploaded order forms, while Zip’s ‘AI invoice coding’ capability offers a new way for accounting teams to reduce manual work and process invoices faster. 

By leveraging AI in these practical ways, Zip is not just streamlining procurement processes but also enabling businesses to make smarter, data-driven decisions about their spending. Miro, for example, is using Zip AI to accelerate legal contract reviews; Coinbase is using it to streamline millions in invoices annually; and UCI Health is implementing it to empower medical staff to focus on patient care without administrative delays.

Market Leadership and Future Outlook

Zip has gained significant momentum among global enterprises. In a major signal to its market leading position, Zip was recently named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Spend Orchestration 2024 Vendor Assessment. This recognition marks the first time spend orchestration has been recognised as its own category by a major analyst firm, validating Zip’s pioneering role in the field.

Building on this momentum from IDC, Zip also recently unveiled a bold new brand design at its second annual Zip Forward conference. More than 450 finance and procurement executives from global companies like Prudential, Arm, and Reddit attended this industry-leading event in San Francisco this September, where they found every inch of Zip’s visual presentation had been reimagined throughout the conference space. Zip’s design team, hailing from design-forward companies like Nike, Airbnb, and Google, sought to further elevate Zip with a cutting-edge, consumer-grade experience that embodies the company’s core philosophy: when businesses achieve ‘flow’ in their work, they unlock their ‘peak’ potential — creating value that elevates the entire business ecosystem.

For Rujul, being named as the market leader in this newly recognised sector is monumental. 

“I think all of this elevates and reinforces how critical this concept of spend orchestration is in business,” Rujul continues. “It's rapidly become the number one topic in procurement technology.”

The demand for Zip across the world

Looking to the future, Rujule and his team have no intention of resting on their laurels. “Zip only hires the best consumer engineers in the world, and we're going to continue to double down,” Rujul adds. 

“We're excited to continue to ramp up, hire, and ‘double-click’ on product innovations. With a lot more exciting announcements in the pipeline, we’ll continue to invest in the product and ultimately that's what makes us different in the world.”

As spend orchestration rapidly becomes the number one topic in procurement technology, Zip is poised to lead the revolution, helping businesses achieve peak performance and optimise their procurement processes in an increasingly complex global economy.

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