Spendflo

Big day for us today. 🔥 Spendflo just launched Flo - The AI procurement workforce. Three agents that autonomously run the full intake-to-pay cycle. Intake, contracts, and Accounts Payable. End-to-end. I've watched our team rebuild the product from the ground up over the last 6 months. Late nights, hard calls, weeks where nobody was sure if we'd land it. Watching it go live today makes every bit of it worth it. And just in time, a thoughtful piece in Forbes by David Prosser , who's been following our story since 2022. Read the Forbes feature: https://lnkd.in/g-yJD73K Siddharth Sridharan Rajiv Ramanan Ajay Vardhan Siddhant Mittal Giridharan Kalyanaraman ( Giri ) Bilal M. VARUN D B Nivethitha Subalakshmi

We rebuilt the entire UI in a month. Not tweaked. Not patched. Rebuilt. Every screen, every flow, every interaction — from scratch. The whole team, hands on, no one sitting out. As a lead engineer at Spendflo managing a large team — a lot of interns and freshers finding their footing. And honestly? This was the biggest team and the biggest project I've ever led. I didn't always know what I was doing. The last few months meant constantly shifting requirements, unblocking people, answering questions, helping everyone move forward — while also being in the build myself. Never enough hours. Always someone who needed something. You want to solve every problem but you physically can't. There's a specific kind of pressure that comes with that. You care too much to cut corners, but the clock doesn't care. Then one day, Flo completed a full intake-to-pay cycle on its own. No one touched it. No handoff. No nudge. It just... worked. End to end. All the hard work of so many people came together in that moment. All the doubts. All the "why are we doing this" questions. Suddenly answered. Flo is Spendflo's AI procurement workforce — the first to run a fully autonomous intake-to-pay cycle. From the moment a request comes in to the moment a vendor gets paid, Flo carries full context and works through it. Procurement and finance teams only step in when something actually needs human judgment. One month. One team. All in. Check Flo out here: https://lnkd.in/giceeUgk

Gear 4 isn't a new technique. It's compression — trusting everything you've built to act on its own. Six months ago, we made that bet at Spendflo. ⚙️ We had good engineers building the right way — rules in code, edge cases handled, every decision accounted for. It worked. But we kept asking: what if the AI just decides? Not as a shortcut. As the architecture. 🔄 We stopped encoding logic and let the model carry context. One shift. Everything changed. There were debates. Decisions unmade and remade. But at some point the system stopped feeling like instructions — and started feeling like something that reasons. That's Flo. → Request in. Vendor paid. Full context carried autonomously — trained on benchmark data from thousands of real vendor negotiations!!! ❤️ Proud of what we shipped. More proud of how we learned to build differently. This is procurement when agents do the work → See Flo

In a world where the cost of building a feature is approaching zero, features are no longer a moat. What actually differentiates is domain knowledge — the depth of understanding a specific workflow, its edge cases, its org-specific quirks. Things that can't be reverse-engineered by a well-funded horizontal platform. That's exactly why we're building Spendflo as a procurement AI platform — not just a tool, but an environment where procurement engineers can configure workflows, create agents, and orchestrate them for outcomes no out-of-the-box product can deliver. This is the forward deployed engineers, but for procurement. That's our bet. Siddharth Sridharan Ajay Vardhan and Rajiv Ramanan have built this domain knowledge the hard way — managing procurement for hundreds of SMBs across the world. That kind of intuition is not something you can acquire with funding or a roadmap. We're not catching up to the AI wave. We're leveraging a strength that puts us at exactly the right place at the right time. Watch out for this space.

Big day for us today. 🔥 Spendflo just launched Flo - The AI procurement workforce. Three agents that autonomously run the full intake-to-pay cycle. Intake, contracts, and Accounts Payable. End-to-end. I've watched our team rebuild the product from the ground up over the last 6 months. Late nights, hard calls, weeks where nobody was sure if we'd land it. Watching it go live today makes every bit of it worth it. Read the Forbes feature: https://lnkd.in/g-yJD73K Giridharan Kalyanaraman ( Giri ) , Dhivya Sivakumar , Kalyan Tripathy , Shravi Sharma , Murali Krishna , Barathwaj Srinivasan , Nitin Srikanth , Raveen Prabu Ravi , Vaishnavi Ganesh , Siddharth Sridharan , Ajay Vardhan , Rajiv Ramanan , Siddhant Mittal , Mahasweta Bhattacharya , Sri Bhaswath Akella, Suha Vignesh

One of the biggest mindset shifts I’ve experienced recently at Spendflo has been moving from “AI-assisted features” to thinking AI-first while building systems. As engineers, we are used to handling edge cases through rules, conditions, and workflows. But working on systems like Flo changed how I think about architecture itself. Instead of encoding every decision path manually, we started designing systems where the model carries context and reasons through the workflow autonomously. That shift impacts everything: 1. how we design workflows 2. how we think about state and context 3. how we handle ambiguity and even how we approach product decisions Really exciting to see this evolve from discussions and experiments into something real. ❤️ Proud to be part of the team building this at Spendflo. Ajay Vardhan Hariprasad K C Salman Shariff Venkataramanan R Naresh E Srimathi Sundarrajan Anusha S

Every few months I'd end a customer call and go down a rabbit hole. What does the future of procurement actually look like? The ideas always sounded exciting. And completely out of reach. That gap used to frustrate me. Smart, capable procurement and finance teams, completely buried. Chasing approvals. Matching invoices. Reviewing the same vendor contract for the third time this quarter. Every customer I spoke to knew it was broken. Nobody had a real answer. Six months ago, our team decided to solve this. They rebuilt Spendflo from the ground up. Because procurement didn't need better software. It needed a workforce. Today we're launching Flo The AI procurement workforce that runs the full intake to pay cycle, from intake to contracts to AP, end to end. Humans step in where judgment is needed. Everything else, Flo handles. The future of procurement I used to debate about on every call. It's here. Watch the video. This is what procurement looks like when agents do the work. Check Flo out here: https://lnkd.in/gf8azZ6v Siddharth Sridharan Rajiv Ramanan Ajay Vardhan Nivas Ravichandran Giridharan Kalyanaraman ( Giri ) Mahasweta Bhattacharya Kalyan Tripathy

If you’re starting out in procurement and worried AI is going to replace you, read this. I get the anxiety. Every headline makes it sound like AI is about to automate buying, negotiation, vendor management, and half the org chart along with it. Here’s the reality from someone who’s spent years in procurement rooms, not just reading about them. AI won’t replace procurement professionals. But it will replace the parts of the job that were never the point. AI is great at: • Reading contracts • Flagging renewals • Summarizing spend • Finding anomalies • Drafting first-pass analysis Those tasks were never where procurement created its real value. Procurement has always been about: • Judgment • Context • Trade-offs • Stakeholder alignment • Risk vs. reward decisions • Influencing outcomes without authority AI doesn’t sit in a room with Legal, Finance, IT, Security, and a business leader who all want different things, and get them aligned.  You do. If you’re early in your career, here’s the advice I give: 1️⃣ Learn the fundamentals deeply P2P flows. Budget ownership. Approval paths. Risk tradeoffs. AI works on top of this knowledge, it doesn’t replace it. 2️⃣ Use AI as a force multiplier, not a crutch Let AI do the reading and summarizing so you can do the thinking. The best procurement pros will move faster, not disappear. 3️⃣ Develop commercial instincts Pricing psychology, incentives, contract levers, vendor behavior. AI can surface data. It can’t read the room. 4️⃣ Get good at storytelling Procurement wins or loses based on how well you explain impact: Cash, risk, speed, growth, and tradeoffs. That’s a human skill. 5️⃣ Be the person who connects the dots Across Finance, Legal, IT, Security, and the business. AI handles fragments. Procurement owns outcomes. The irony? AI actually makes procurement more strategic, by removing the busywork that kept teams stuck in operations. If you’re worried about AI in procurement, don’t ask: “Will AI replace me?” Ask: “How do I become the kind of procurement professional AI makes more powerful?” That’s where the opportunity is. Spendflo Siddharth Sridharan Rajiv Ramanan Ajay Vardhan

My three year old son Eli asked me what my job is today... Me: “Eli, Daddy’s job at Spendflo is building procurement software that helps companies buy what they need to run.” Eli: blank stare "Pro Cure Met? So I tried again. “Okay bug… you know how you want Ninja Turtles, the “good” snacks, and new shoes that make you run faster?” Eli: “YES.” “Well, Daddy helps make sure we buy the right turtles, the right snacks, and the right shoes not too expensive, not broken, and we have them when you need them.” Eli: “So you go to Target?” “Kind of. But first I ask who needs it, why they need it, and if we already have one at home.” Eli paused and gave me his best serious face. "Like when Mommy says we have plenty of snacks?" "Exactly, but sometimes the Ninja Turtle store asks for too much money, so Daddy talks to them and says,  'That’s not a fair price. Let’s do better.'" His sister jumps in….. "So you’re the no guy?" "No, I’m the smart yes guy." Eli smiled. “Okay, So you only get what we need? Can we buy Christmas tree cakes now?” And that’s procurement: Helping teams get what they need, at the right time, for the right price, so everyone gets seasonal little debbie cakes in the end. If a 3-year-old can get it, maybe procurement isn’t that complicated after all. Happy Holidays and I hope you all get to create fun memories with the ones you love!