Investment Notes: Cotiss

We’re excited to announce that we have led the pre-seed round for Cotiss. Cotiss unlocks best practice procurement for small to medium procurement teams with simple and powerful software.

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An unloved craft

Procurement departments - the team that purchases the products and services a company needs to do business - tend to be unloved. Typically tacked-on to the finance team, procurement teams can be viewed by others as penny-pinchers and process-jockeys focused on risk mitigation, not innovation. Part of the problem is that procurement teams don’t have access to fit-for-purpose tools for the job.

90%+ of them are stuck using the Microsoft suite. Microsoft is great for many things, but it’s not great for procurement: this leads to trouble with 1) Documentation control; 2) Collaboration; and 3) Compliance. Documents get lost, compliance processes are mismanaged and poor supplier decisions are compounded with a lack of accountability. 

Cotiss is here to change that. The company’s vision is to unlock best-practice procurement for small to medium teams with easy to use software, allowing them to focus on creating value, not just on running a process.

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Customer obsession meets raw hustle

Cotiss was founded by Harry Wilde, Matthew O'Halloran and Matthew Whiting. Harry is the problem obsessed evangelist, Matt O is the builder and Matt W provides operational rigour that drives their internal execution cadence. Together they’re a founding team with spikes in complementary areas that we’re excited to watch it unhatch. 

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We first met the team at one of our Giants community events last year where they cornered us to talk us through Cotiss. As it turns out, this hustle in selling their vision was emblematic of much more. In the early days of customer discovery Harry was a man possessed, cold calling >250 procurement managers a week to explore their challenges: a level of brute force action we love to see from founders. This deep obsession with customers' problems flows through to a crystal clear product roadmap.

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From process to value

At the core of Cotiss’ product is a workflow tool that enables procurement teams to design, manage, evaluate and audit their processes, end-to-end. This allows procurement teams to shift from running the process of procurement, to focusing on things that actually drive business outcomes: sourcing and cultivating supplier relationships. 

Right at the beginning

Cotiss has just released the first version of the platform and onboarded its first customers. Early customer feedback reiterates the need for an intuitive end-to-end platform guiding best practice:

"It’s impressive that you can have from concept to contract all in one place. Like you say, we use Excel, Outlook, a contract manager, DocuSign, and Bidnet, different methods or tools to do that."

We’re excited to see the Cotiss product roadmap come to life and to watch the customer feedback roll in.

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Are you a small to medium (<25 people) procurement team who might benefit from using Cotiss? Sign up for a demo here