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Among the many departments and verticals that decorate the AI billboards of San Francisco and subway stops in New York - where greenfield seems plentiful whichever direction your die is cast, there’s a particular space quietly larger than much of the rest. Though enterprise procurement departments have over the past few decades supported a number of strong software outcomes, the largest opportunities in the market remain overwhelmingly untapped. Today Pranav Mulgund, Naveen Kashyap, and the rest of the team at Fragment announce their Series A; our good fortune to lead the round reflects our conviction that they will come to define the category - bringing best-in-class technical talent to turn the most languid parts of supply chain work into product that delights procurement professionals.

‍A Brief History of Procurement Technology

The last 40 or so years have seen a few waves of technology in procurement. In the nineties, ERPs gave every purchase order, receipt, and invoice a home in a single system of record. By the turn of the century, companies like Ariba pushed to bring buyers and suppliers onto a single digital network. And during the cloud era, companies like Coupa and Zip turned purchasing decisions into something the C-Suite could more easily visualize and steer.

The most recent of these waves found its greatest successes in what people refer to as indirect procurement - purchases that go into Opex, from laptops and printers to soap for the office kitchen. In indirect, the primary job is to control and route spend: who is allowed to buy what, which approvals a purchase requires, and how to consolidate vendors and stamp out maverick spend. That work rewards clean workflows and visibility which SaaS delivered handsomely.

Direct procurement - everything a company buys to make what it sells, the resins, chips, castings, and wire harnesses that make up the costup cost of goods sold - has proven less obliging to new technology. A buyer at a large manufacturer spends far more of his or her day pursuing suppliers than permissioning spend: chasing a vendor who has quietly pushed a ship date, reconciling an engineering change against a purchase order cut months ago, or puzzling over an invoice that arrived eighteen cents higher per unit than anyone remembers agreeing to. Answers to these questions rarely sit neatly in the ERP and are more often scattered across email threads, PDFs, and the memory of whoever owns the supplier relationship - which explains why a generation of software largely ignored this part of the equation. left this half of the house alone.

The Other Half of the House

The same things that kept software out of direct procurement - unstructured documents, endless correspondence over exceptions - happen, of course, to be what language models handle best. Reading a supplier’s note, finding the surcharge mentioned in passing three weeks earlier, and writing back with the right question now fall squarely within what software can do. 

The prize on this side of the house dwarfs the other. Once its approvals are set, indirect often runs itself; a laptop order rarely needs a second conversation. Direct never stops needing them. Every part brings a supplier to coordinate and a steady drip of changes, delays, and discrepancies to work through by hand - which is why the largest manufacturers staff procurement teams in the thousands. The stakes for direct procurement also run much higher. Whereas a botched office-supply order costs an afternoon, a missed change order on a single component can idle a production line. 

Today, the promise of Fragment is a platform roduct that delights procurement professionals by meeting them on Monday with the weekend’s slipped ship date already chased, Friday’s engineering change confirmed with the vendor, and that eighteen-cent discrepancy already traced to an unapproved surcharge. Its future, we suspect, lies somewhere grander still. In the course of all that chasing, Fragment comes into possession of something procurement has long coveted. The truest knowledge of a supplier base - who ships late, who holds price when copper climbs, who answers on a Sunday - has always lived in the memories of veteran buyers, passed along over lunch and lost at retirement. Ariba tried to coax it onto a network and found suppliers unwilling to be coaxed; Fragment simply gathers it as it goes, across existing systems, creating a foundational blueprint. until folklore begins to resemble a map. In time, that blueprint map may shape not merely how companies tend to what they buy, but what they buy and from whom. That judgment can protect an entire production schedule. Fragment truly has the power to turn buyers from tactical firefighters into strategic assets.

The Team

Pranav built the procurement function at Zoom and later led product at Mindy; Naveen spent his years at Instabase teaching software to make sense of the unruly documents enterprises run on, then joined Mindy as a founding engineer. Around them they have gathered best-in-class technical talent alongside commercial leaders who have sold into some of the world’s largest manufacturers. Procurement has rarely been the beneficiary of engineers of this caliber; with Fragment, it finally has a team equal to the size of the problem.

Fragment x 8VC

8VC has long backed companies modernizing the physical economy, and few corners of it have waited longer for the right tools than this one. We feel lucky to partner with Pranav, Naveen, and the Fragment team. 

To learn more, or to join them, visit fragment.ai! 

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