Lio raises $30M from Andreessen Horowitz and others for venture capital

Lio’s co-founders know firsthand that procurement — the process businesses use to buy services from suppliers — can often be a stumbling block. Vladimir Keil, the founder and CEO of the company, faced this problem as an employee within a large company and during the first construction.

“When we sold business software, we had to find out for ourselves and see how manual and fragmented the process was,” he told TechCrunch. Kiel and his team have developed a sustainable platform for AI assistants — programs that can complete tasks on behalf of humans — to help improve some of these divisions.

On Thursday, Lio announced a $30 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. SV Angels, Harry Stebbings, and YC also participated (Lio was part of the Spring’23 team). The company has raised $33 million to date. Keil said the new headquarters will be used to expand the company’s US presence and increase the capabilities of Lio’s AI assistants, which aim to complete the entire acquisition process for enterprise customers.

Procurement is at the heart of business investment, as companies look to purchase everything from manufacturing equipment to technical services. Every procurement process requires attention and dedication: Often one has to open some kind of Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, software, look at contract management, search the supplier database, run compliance checks, index funds, dig up emails, and so on.

“Even with modern eProcurement software, much of the actual work is still done manually,” Keil told TechCrunch. Companies are left to build large internal teams or outsource this work, resulting in a low-cost, high-cost process. Keil had an idea – if the sales process is static and repetitive, then this is the kind of work that an AI assistant is well equipped to do.

He teamed up with friends Lukas Heinzman and Till Wagner and in 2023, the trio founded Lio, a logistics service provider. Lio uses an AI platform with an infrastructure that completes the entire shopping process

“Every previous generation of shopping technology was built on the same premise, that people would do the work and the technology would help them do it faster,” Keil said. “We take a very different approach. Instead of building software to help people do the shopping, Lio deploys AI that drives itself.”

Liowa’s agents work above and beyond businesses to read documents, evaluate vendors, negotiate, and execute everything. “Processes that used to take weeks can now be completed in minutes,” Keil said, adding that the startup has already helped companies manage billions of transactions. “In other words, a global manufacturer was able to create 75% of its pre-ordered sales within six months.”

Lio is one of many companies that have come up redefine business softwarewith the help of agent AI capabilities change the way business software works.

Keil sees Lio’s competitors as procurement software vendors (such as SAP Ariba and Oracle), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers, and consulting firms that support these companies and services.

“Instead of spending most of their time processing requests and documents, teams can have more conversations, analyze more vendors, and find savings opportunities that might otherwise be missed,” Keil said. “In the long run, we think this is turning procurement from the back office into a much more powerful driver in the business process.”