Our colleague Brandon Gleklen recently posted about how “AI Is Growing Our Appetite for SaaS, Not Destroying It.” While some in the market are ominously predicting the death of SaaS, our team has instead leaned into the current moment, excitedly evaluating hopefuls for the next generation of enterprise software. In industries ranging from accounting to marketing to HR, we’ve grown to believe that some incumbents in these sectors will struggle to elegantly integrate AI into their platforms, creating opportunities for AI-native core operating systems that we believe will become pillars to modern businesses across sectors.  

But what does AI-native mean? It’s a term that quickly became ubiquitous, appearing in marketing materials, new launches and pitch decks. Internally, we’ve refined the definition to mean products designed and built with both LLM-powered automation and humans as first-class citizens. In some cases, this could mean a product feature designed with an AI copilot to help drive efficiency in high-value work. In other cases, AI will be used to help automate rote and manual tasks that would traditionally keep someone in the office late.     

Through speaking with hundreds of founders across multiple sectors, procurement stood out to us as a function where these principles can be applied effectively. Having spent more than two decades in the space after investing in SupplierMarket* (acquired by Ariba) during the dot-com boom and then leading Coupa’s* Series B back in 2008, we’ve had a front-row seat to the transformation of procurement from a back-office function to a strategic lever for business performance. The first wave of procurement tools played a pivotal role in bringing visibility and control to spend management across large enterprises. And what has become increasingly clear is that the next wave of innovation in procurement should be AI-native.  

Why? LLMs are effective at parsing and organizing unstructured data, making LLM-powered automation a natural fit for the type of diverse content procurement teams work with every day, including invoices, RFPs, and supplier questionnaires. RFP generation, supplier enrichment, and invoice analysis will all, in our view, become table stakes for procurement teams. But where would a company start in building an AI-native procurement platform? We think spending years growing to appreciate the pain points of procurement teams is, in our view, the perfect prerequisite.  

As we evaluated companies across the market, Alex Yakubovich and Stan Garber at Levelpath* shined in their forward thinking on how to become AI-native and build lasting products for the next decades. Prior to starting Levelpath, Alex and Stan co-founded ScoutRFP, a popular sourcing and supplier platform that sold to Workday in 2019. The experience gave Alex and Stan firsthand experience understanding the pain points of procurement professionals.  

With a big vision, the team came back together in 2022 to build a unified procurement suite that is both mobile- and AI-native, a move intended to disrupt a category of strong legacy products and new startups. A key tenet of this mission is Levelpath’s supplier data model, which delivers a unified user experience across procurement applications and better AI integration. This integration allows for proactive supplier insights, dynamic risk detection and seamless tracking across every phase of the procurement lifecycle.  

Rather than bolting AI on top of legacy architecture, Levelpath embeds AI deeply into both user workflows and backend logic, aiming to automate intake, supplier evaluation, RFP creation and contract management. The team hopes to end the days of poorly integrated, manual solutions in procurement and has been working hard over the last several years to build an extensive platform with early customers.  

We’re excited to announce that we’re leading a $55M+ Series B round and will be working with Stan, Alex, and the entire Levelpath team in their effort to build  a high-performing, AI-native procurement platform. Our conviction stems from the team’s pedigree, early customer wins and what we see as broader market demand for a solution to disrupt the large, underserved procurement ecosystem. As the capabilities of AI continue to grow and evolve, we believe Levelpath will help shape what AI-native means in practice for procurement.