The internet solved the problem of disparate buying experiences for things like travel where users are no longer required to go to an endless sea of vendors; instead, individual choices are aggregated on sites like Expedia, providing transparency, pricing information, and accessible comparison tools. For businesses, most are still reliant on fragmented direct purchasing experiences across a wide spectrum of vendors that provide from everything to pens to software, creating a real pain point and bottleneck for accounting, procurement, and the people themselves that depend on these goods and services. Order is a B2B buying marketplace for businesses that centralizes the entire procurement process in one platform. The platform handles the end-to-end journey from ordering to delivery and integrates with existing workflows, vendors, and software. The versatility allows organizations to be nimbler while meeting the requirements of finance, operations, and procurement. Order also has an offering for SaaS businesses with an integrated fintech offering that focuses on net revenue retention to drive loyalty among the software providers on the platform. Both revenue and spend on the platform have been growing 200%-300% annually according to the company.
AlleyWatch caught up with Order CEO and Cofounder Zach Garippa to learn more about how Order streamlines the procurement process, how the company’s reimagining of the procurement process drives the payments business, expansion plans, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $44.7M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised a $30M Series B round led by Stage 2 Capital in partnership with MIT’s Endowment, a $30B+ fund with a track record of investing in transformative companies.
Tell us about the product or service that Order offers.
Order is a guided B2B marketplace with a mission to simplify buying for businesses. Order makes it easy for businesses to place and track purchases across all their vendors, control spend, and make payments in a single, consolidated bill. We also provide tailored insights and purchasing recommendations to fuel smarter spending decisions so businesses can easily save time and money on what they need to grow.
What inspired the start of Order?
Buying for a business seemed unnecessarily complex to us. We quickly came to learn that the process for buying things for businesses was leading to a lot of suboptimal business outcomes (wasted time and money) in addition to chaos for those doing the actual purchasing work – mainly finance, operations, and procurement teams. As these businesses grew, they were only dealing with more orders, invoices, workflows, and ultimately more messes.
We immediately fell in love with the problem and were determined to help alleviate a lot of the pain that these businesses were experiencing.
How is Order different?
There are many point solutions in the market today that are working to ease the pain for one specific constituent at a time, but we realized early on that no one was tackling the buying process from the start – at the point of purchase – and solving through to payment.
We take a novel approach by developing software and predictive applications that allow us to upstream the purchase by attaching ourselves to the transaction. In this way, we can solve multiple pain points, for multiple constituents, simultaneously.
We sit at the intersection of a business, its vendors, and its payment methods by providing:
- a single, easy e-commerce experience to place orders via a highly curated catalog
- automatic and intelligent procurement, fulfillment, and delivery tracking
- a full suite of spend controls for budgets, approvals, and reporting
- insights and recommendations to fuel smarter spending decisions
- a single consolidated bill across all spend, and automated payments
What market does Order target and how big is it?
We see ourselves in the B2B payments space. The B2B payments space accounts for 53% of the $235 trillion in global payment volume, which is more than all other payment types combined. $23 trillion of this is in the US alone, with the opportunity growing at every business size.
The B2B payments problem lies in the manual processes surrounding and leading up to the payment – order processing, purchase order generation, supplier management, invoice processing – the list goes on.
Everyone is hyper-focused on optimizing the moment of payment, but it’s too late in the game. We believe that you have to win the purchase to win the payment.
What’s your business model?
Order operates as a SaaS+ business, meaning that in addition to a base subscription fee we also employ embedded fintech as a secondary model.
SaaS+ businesses are uniquely positioned to solve complex customer problems because the incentives are perfectly aligned with the customer. In order for a business to increase revenue per customer, they need customers to receive value quickly with increasing value over time. This perpetuates an amazing flywheel of increased value, increased revenue, and accelerated product innovation.
What are your post-COVID office plans??
Flexibility is key. It’s important to us that our employees have a safe and effective working environment, whether that’s in our new headquarters located in the Flatiron District, our office in Vegas, or in the comfort of their own homes. Our employees really love working together and have expressed interest in a return to the office, so we’re currently working through a plan that leverages internal software to monitor employee health and wellness to make that happen!
What was the funding process like?
The funding process was incredibly fast. We pride ourselves on raising when we believe we can actually use the funding vs. raising because it’s a good time to raise as a company (and you figure out what to do with it later). We are proud and thankful that this style resonated with MIT and Stage 2 Capital who moved quickly but incredibly thoroughly (i.e. a ton of customer calls, deep understanding of sales efficiency, among other strong areas) so that when funding cleared we were already well on our way to plan.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Not only making sure that our business (from business plan to mission and vision) matches with the fund, but also the partner. Using Order as an example, we know what we are uniquely good at and we know where we need help. So it can be difficult to navigate the capital landscape down to the partner level because we are looking for people who can have an outsized impact on our business.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We operate a “SaaS+” business which is a bit unique since it combines more traditional software licensing with a usage-based/embedded fintech play. I believe this is really exciting for some investors who overweight retention because these businesses combined with tight execution can result in incredibly high net revenue retention (ours currently is 200%+)
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We have three key areas where we’re focusing most of our efforts over the next several months: new logo acquisition, speed to spend (how quickly can we onboard customers), and talent (both new hires and improving training and support for existing)
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Spend your time trying to isolate your one or two biggest growth levers. It’s not easy and companies will always have competing priorities, but it’s worthwhile consciously trying to do this exercise. This will allow everyone on the team – no matter the size – to utilize existing resources wisely. You would be surprised how much you can stretch a dollar if it’s behind one or two things vs. ten!
Spend your time trying to isolate your one or two biggest growth levers. It’s not easy and companies will always have competing priorities, but it’s worthwhile consciously trying to do this exercise. This will allow everyone on the team – no matter the size – to utilize existing resources wisely. You would be surprised how much you can stretch a dollar if it’s behind one or two things vs. ten!
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Only up from here! We have never been more certain about the team, we are fresh off a rebrand and a fundraise and feel incredibly excited about this momentum heading into 2022.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC?
Quality Eats has an amazing outdoor dining experience and there are a couple of locations around the city. During Covid, they built these awesome outdoor seating spaces equipped with ceiling fans, climate control, and even Bluetooth speakers so your party can play their own music!
