Tag: Coupa Inspire

Coupa is an AI-powered spend management platform with big customer numbers – and even bigger ambitions. As the company targets Europe for further growth, Paul Hamblin meets its new international head.

The name? It started with a caffe latte – or maybe an espresso.

The story begins in 2006 at Coupa, a Palo Alto cafe where two former Oracle execs sat down to formulate a transformational software for e-procurement. Nineteen years later, the cloud-based platform they created has evolved into a spend management platform used by over 3,200 customers worldwide, including some of the largest and best-known multinationals, plus a community network of over 10 million participants. In 2023, the company was acquired by private equity software specialist Thoma Bravo for a reported $8 billion.

That’s quite a journey from a couple of coffees and croissants. And the name has stuck.

What exactly is ‘Spend management’? It can mean several things to Coupa customers both large and small, including some or all of procurement, invoicing, compliance (with contracts and regulatory matters) and payments to suppliers. Automation and optimisation of processes accompanied by analytics of cost and performance are the most obvious benefits.

The real win is that the software connects an enormous network of buyers and suppliers. As the world knows, networks mean data; and data means AI can start to work its magic.

Perfect Combination for Data

Coupa’s pitch to customers and prospects is that it combines AI with the world’s best direct and indirect total spend management platform. This enables, in the company’s own words, the ‘world’s largest supply and demand data reservoir’.

It goes without saying that the best data makes the best AI. ‘We are all smarter together,’ and ‘We make every dollar matter’ are two neat messages that Coupa deploys to drive home this advantage. Put it all together and the result is a ‘margin multiplier’.

Joao Paulo da Silva, a Portuguese national now based in Madrid, was appointed in summer 2024 to lead the team’s international expansion everywhere outside the Americas. I met him at Coupa Inspire in London, the latest stop on a world tour of conferences attended by customers, partners and consultants. A veteran of SAP, major consultancies and private equity organisations, he is clear about the road ahead for Coupa.

“We have a strong agenda for growth. We are currently about $1.1 billion ARR, we plan to double in size in the next 3-4 years to $2 billion, and in 8-10 years we are targeting $10 billion ARR.”

These are undeniably bold targets. How will the company achieve them?

“Growth will come from the expansion of our business both in the Americas and internationally, and by enhancing and augmenting our portfolio. First, we will widen our geographical footprint. Southern Europe including Italy and Spain, South-East Asia and Japan are all strong growth territories for us.”

Portfolio enhancements will come as Coupa widens its overall offering to customers. “Coupa is always very strong in indirect procurement, but in some of the more complex industries, such as manufacturing, we are now increasingly able to offer more in direct procurement,” he reveals.

Another expansion area is category management support to help customers strategize more specifically category by category (examples might include IT, or transport logistics). The acquisition in May 2025 of Croatia-based Cirtuo, a proven specialist in category management software, provides evidence of this portfolio broadening.

Alongside portfolio growth, the partnership network will also increase. “We are making a big global investment in this area to make sure we have a large network of partners capable of supporting mid-market businesses that are very eager to capture and use the same solutions as the big organisations,” he explains.

Supply Chain Design Support

It brings us to the core question. What can Coupa offer that its competitors cannot?

“Today we have the largest dataset in the industry with a capability beyond what anyone else has,” he argues. “We aggregate the data from 3500 customers – from Amazon to much smaller businesses – and this provides insights to our community. We are a unique company because no other vendor has the capability to provide what we can. Yes, a rival solution might give the customer the capacity to transact, to perform a procurement task, but no other company gives the ability to operate that task in the context of such useful information and insights. Our community is very strong, our customers come together to share experiences and information in a way that few software companies can achieve.”

He brings us back to that powerful ‘margin multiplier’ image. “We are the only platform that can manage the total spend of a company, from supply chain to payment, and make it transparent in one single view. That’s why we say it’s a margin multiplier, because if you multiply the small efficiencies made possible in each component of the platform, it becomes EBITDA-relevant for the company.”

He says Coupa is taking the Procure-to-Pay model a stage beyond; an updated description might be ‘Design-to-Pay’ partner. It’s a description facilitated by the company’s acquisition of established supply chain software specialist Llamasoft back in 2020, furthered by the Cirtuo addition.

“We are now helping you as the customer design your supply chain. You as the customer know your strategy and what you want to achieve with your objectives: they might be to cut costs, improve sustainability or resilience. Whatever you strategize, the important thing is that it links to the execution, the backbone of the platform where you obtain objective feedback on that strategy. Was it the right strategy? Constant feedback from the platform is crucial to your understanding. Once you are satisfied with your strategic objectives, the tool will provide three AI-based models to enable you to execute optimally on that strategy.”

AI Opportunities – Not Threats

AI is clearly a game-changer in supply chain design and execution, but do the much-discussed fears about the technology have any justification, in Mr da Silva’s view?

“The beauty of Coupa is that we have been cloud-native since the beginning and many of our solutions already incorporate AI functions. It’s something we’re very comfortable with. But look at all the innovations in history; all created more jobs than before, and I believe that is what will happen again this time.”

That’s another bold assertion. He enlarges: “This is the first time in history you have a technology that every single department in the company wants to use. Think of blockchain, say, which directly only affects certain teams. As we mature all these models and improve and develop the things that we will be able to do, workers are going to be more specialised because they will be able to process so much more information as part of their role. There will be many more insights to leverage, delivered with more precision. The AI journey is a fascinating one.”

Mr da Silva (pictured, below) advocates the view that AI and automation are about enabling people, not replacing them. He cites an example from that day’s earlier keynote at Coupa Inspire, in which a major bank explained how touchless procurement had enabled it to shift staff from cost control teams to revenue-generating functions.

“Digital also allows to react much faster,” he adds, citing another example described at Coupa Inspire. “You are alerted to a potential issue somewhere in the world straightaway. That means you can anticipate difficulties and act to mitigate them. Our client described how, very soon after an earthquake, the platform started picking up signals showing problems in supply logistics in the region, immediately generating an automated RFP to alternative suppliers so that schedules are disrupted as minimally as possible.”

The current volatility and uncertainty in world trade is a perfect example of what causes companies to enter, in the pithy phrase of Coupa CEO Leagh Turner, “a margin erosion zone”.

Joao Paulo da Silva agrees. “We are all about cost-saving, so during global slowdowns we are here to help, and in a very dynamic way. In the past, a company might take a whole month to redesign its supply chain when reacting to unexpected events; now we can do it in a few hours. The system helps customers to simulate different scenarios and thus give them greater confidence in their decision making. What do I do if the tariff landscape changes? How does it impact me? How do I redeploy logistics centres? Or production? The platform will offer options and solutions.”