Fairmarkit, a platform that automates enterprise procurement of goods like office or cleaning supplies and services, raises $11M Series A
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Fairmarkit's $11M Series A lands mid-way through an unusually busy 2019 for procurement automation: weeks earlier, Procurify raised a $20M Series B for its cloud-based purchasing platform used in 71 countries, and Scoutbee pulled in a $12M Series A for AI-driven supplier discovery. The common thread is that investors are funding different slices of the same workflow — Fairmarkit attacks the high-volume, low-visibility end: routine goods like office and cleaning supplies and recurring services.
The bet paid forward on the corpus itself: fourteen months later Fairmarkit raised a $30M Series B, citing enterprise clients including Boston's mass transit system, bringing total funding to $42M.
First-order effects
- Fairmarkit gains the capital to scale sales and engineering around automating purchases that enterprises traditionally handle through manual RFQs and email chains, with public-sector buyers such as Boston's transit system among the target accounts.
- Enterprise purchasing teams for routine supplies get an automated alternative to ad-hoc vendor outreach, shifting quote-gathering work from staff time to software.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent-category rivals feel the squeeze to bundle rather than stay point solutions: Procurify's general purchasing platform and Scoutbee's supplier-discovery marketplace now compete with a player automating the transaction layer beneath them.
- Contract-layer automation follows the money — Agiloft's $45M raise months later shows investors funding each stage of the procure-to-pay chain, pushing vendors toward integration or consolidation.
Third-order effects
- If the funding pattern holds across these rounds, procurement consolidates into full-stack platforms spanning sourcing, contracting, and payment, eroding standalone tools and the manual purchasing roles built around fragmented workflows.
The trend: Venture capital is systematically funding each layer of enterprise procurement automation — discovery, purchasing, contracts — signaling a shift toward integrated software platforms replacing manual buying processes.