Vertice has bought Vendr. The London-based AI procurement company announced on Monday that it has acquired the US software-pricing firm, a deal it says creates the world’s largest procurement intelligence dataset by combining the two companies’ data on what they buy and how they negotiate. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The combined dataset, according to Vertice, covers more than $75bn in global indirect spend across 32,000 vendors, and includes real-world pricing and human-to-human interactions drawn from 250,000 negotiated contracts spanning software and services.
Vertice founder and chief executive Roy Tuvey put the pooled software-pricing data at more than two million price points, which he said surpasses the nearest competitors “by an order of magnitude.”
The pitch is that more data makes for better automated negotiation. Vertice runs an autonomous negotiation agent it calls Ana, trained, it says, on hundreds of thousands of real-world negotiations. Buyers set their priorities, policies and thresholds, and Ana engages the vendor directly to push for outcomes such as cost savings, better payment terms or policy compliance. Folding in Vendr’s negotiation data, Tuvey said, makes that agent “even more powerful.”
