Contingent targets broken procurement processes

Evaluating and keeping an eye on the suppliers to your business is crucial, and fantastically complicated. Contingent leaps to the rescue, armed with a freshly printed $8.2 million check from investors. The SaaS platform helps companies procure more strategically and better manage supply chain risk and compliance.

“The typical questionnaire process to onboard suppliers is widely accepted to be fundamentally broken. A huge amount of buyer and seller time and resources are wasted in collecting information from suppliers, most of which is rarely read,” Tai Alegbe, co-founder and CEO of Contingent, says. “It’s hard to spot risks, with companies reliant on supplier self-certification, and with no time or information to verify claims.”

The company is wrapping up a lot of compliance, supply-chain and supplier challenges and surfaces potential risks.

“The company was conceived quite some time ago. It built on insights I had gathered from previous experience, in and around third-party risks, supply chain and procurement. It became really clear at previous companies that there were common themes and challenges that corporations were facing,” explains Alegbe. “Supply chain is a particularly acute challenge for the world globally today. That is true for almost all companies and for governments as well.”

The company aims to address a lot of different categories of business risk, with the ultimate goal of increasing resilience for the companies it works with. The company looks at risks from a supply perspective, resilience from a financial perspective and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) perspective. It also aims to give sustainability center stage as part of the process. On the whole, the company looks at the actual risks that its customers might have in terms of being able to deliver their product or service.

“At the heart of it, we are building a new category. We believe that supply chain and procurement as a function is going to radically evolve over the next 5-10 years, where companies will pick suppliers based on their values… that companies will choose to do business with other companies aligned with their values, versus simply just their capabilities and costs,” Alegbe predicts. “And as a result, we see that as an emerging new compliant-by-design category. We see ourselves as being at the heart of that shift, and we can really help companies embrace that change.”

The round was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Connect Ventures, Concentric, Seedcamp, Ascension and Working Capital Innovation Fund. This takes the company’s total funding to date to $11 million, with previous investment led by Connect Ventures. Contingent claims its global customer base has been growing at over 10x, and that its platform is in use by procurement and supply chain teams at a star-studded list of companies, including Monzo, Seagate, Huel, Barratt Developments plc and the U.K. government.

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