Coupa Acquires AI-Powered Supply Chain Design & Planning Leader LLamasoft for $1.5 billion

Coupa Software Acquires LLamasoft

Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), announced that it has acquired LLamasoft, a leader in AI-powered supply chain design and planning for a purchase price of approximately $1.5 billion.

Based in Ann Arbor, Mich., LLamasoft’s technology is used by hundreds of enterprise customers, including brands such as Boeing, Danone S.A., Home Depot, and Nestle.

The acquisition will strengthen Coupa’s supply chain capabilities, enabling businesses to drive greater value through Business Spend Management.

The events of this year continue to demonstrate the importance of supply chain agility, as companies work to more rapidly adapt to changing consumer preferences, economic conditions, and the political landscape.

With demand uncertainty on one hand and supply volatility on the other, companies are in need of supply chain technology that can help them assess alternatives and balance trade-offs to achieve desired business results.

LLamasoft provides these capabilities with an AI-powered cloud platform that empowers companies to make smarter supply chain decisions, faster.

“We are witnessing an unprecedented shift in what businesses are demanding to effectively manage their supply chains. They need instant visibility, agile planning capabilities, and timely risk mitigation support,” said Rob Bernshteyn, chairman and CEO at Coupa.

“LLamasoft’s deep supply chain expertise and sophisticated data science and modeling capabilities, combined with the roughly $2 trillion of cumulative transactional spend data we have in Coupa, will empower businesses with the intelligence needed to pivot on a dime. Together, we will deliver a more powerful Business Spend Management platform to help organizations everywhere maximize the value of every dollar they spend in a smarter, simpler, and safer way.”

Launched in January 2020, LLamasoft’s newest product llama.ai, delivers AI-powered decision making across the supply chain to support an almost unlimited number of use cases.

With llama.ai, organizations can create purpose-built applications that leverage an end-to-end decision data model and employ a library of proven supply chain algorithms.

These applications can run what-if scenarios and surface valuable insights before organizations make key business decisions.

“We are very excited about joining forces with Coupa,” said Razat Gaurav, CEO at LLamasoft.

“Combining Coupa’s market-leading spend management execution core and broad market reach with LLamasoft’s AI-powered supply chain analytics provides a unique opportunity to bring together digital transformation solutions that drive decision making and operational efficiency across the enterprise. I am equally excited for employees of both organizations who share a culture that prioritizes delivering innovation and exceptional customer value.”

Most recently, LLamasoft was named to Inc. 5000 List of Fastest-Growing Private Companies for the fifth consecutive year, the 2020 Detroit Free Press Top Workplace, and Supply & Demand Chain Executive Green Supply Chain Award 2019.

“This very timely acquisition comes as supply chains are undergoing tremendous disruption that is best navigated using AI-enabled decision processes surrounding a digital twin of the end-to-end supply chain,” said Mickey North Rizza, program vice president of enterprise applications and digital commerce at IDC.

“Incorporating supply chain planning capabilities as part of a comprehensive BSM strategy will give companies more visibility and control across their direct and indirect spend.”

Donna Wilczek, senior vice president of product strategy at Coupa, told Logistics Management's Jeff Berman that with this acquisition, Llamasoft is a company that is able to accelerate various challenges for customers.

“If there’s one thing that has become apparent this year, it is that supply chains need to constantly adapt to change, that risk has to be proactively managed, and that capital preservation is imperative,” she said. “With demand uncertainty on one hand and supply volatility on the other, companies are in need of technology that can help them balance the constant trade-offs of service, profitability and risk to meet the changing demands of consumers amid an increasingly dynamic global business environment. These are conversations we have been having with customers around the globe.”

And she highlighted three areas in which LLamasoft is a great fit for Coupa and its customers, including:

1. Breaking down silos: LLamasoft helps customers break down the silos across departments within the supply chain like product design, manufacturing, and distribution, just as Coupa helps customers break down silos across procurement, finance, legal, risk & compliance, and other groups involved in spend management. By bringing leading supply chain planning capabilities into the same platform as our Source-to-Pay and Treasury capabilities, a whole new level of collaboration and data sharing across departments and between companies and suppliers will become possible. For example, we envision a day where treasurers have a real-time understanding of cash forecasting based on supply chain decisions;
2. Connecting the dots for greater visibility and control: Coupa’s nearly $2 trillion in business spend and supplier performance data together with LLamasoft’s AI-powered supply chain analytics platform is a powerful combination that will allow customers to design supply chain strategies to support specific business goals and gain greater visibility into and control over the direct and indirect spending related to achieving them; and
3. Driving value for customers: Both companies share a vision for driving tangible, measurable value for global companies. Together, she said they will deliver a more powerful Business Spend Management platform to help organizations everywhere maximize the value of every dollar they spend in a smarter, simpler, and safer way. Ultimately, Coupa plans to connect supply chain design and planning with the resulting execution aspects (i.e. sourcing optimization and cash flow optimization) to drive the effectiveness of every dollar a business spends.

To learn more about the Coupa BSM Platform, which empowers the world’s most successful organizations with the visibility and control they need to manage all their spend in one place, visit www.coupa.com.

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