A Note from Our CEO on Series A Announcement

On Monday, August 16, I was excited to announce that my company, Tropic has raised $25M funding, coming on the back of 4 straight quarters of revenue growth, fueling our R&D and recruiting.

We want to transform procurement, and we’re focused on SaaS. In the old days, procurement was designed to buy things with a fixed price at a fixed point in time – think jet fuel for a Boeing, car parts for a Ford, cotton for a t-shirt. SaaS is completely different: ever-changing pricing that is not shared publicly, product replacements, subscriptions to manage, opt out clauses, but the purchasing has struggled to evolve.

Why does this matter?

My belief is that software is either the only commodity that matters in your industry or it soon will be. Most folks have heard Marc Andreessen say “software is eating the world,” and the number of tools a company is using has skyrocketed. Products are made of software and built on software. How many apps do you have open right now, just to do your job?

In the proliferation, there is confusion. What are we using? How much are we spending? Are we getting a good deal? In the confusion most companies are paying too much for software, spending too much time buying software, and don’t know what to do about it.

I’ve been on all sides of the software procurement process. Buying, selling, upselling. Every time, it’s brutal: too many phone calls, too many emails, too much uncertainty, too little transparency. The brutality compounds when you multiply the process across 50+ agreements.

So we started creating solutions for a bunch of simple pain points:

• My contracts are disorganized and difficult to understand.
• I don’t want to spend time negotiating with another sales or account management team because I am focused on strategic things.
• I don’t know how or if we’re using the software we’re paying for.
• I have no idea if I’m getting a fair price.

Sooner or later, we realized that the whole procurement process was broken. We’re working to fix it.

Many one-point solutions have tried to chip away at this problem but still require you to do the most painful things yourself. We’re focused on giving you clarity on your software footprint to make strategic decisions about your budget, while automating the emails and phone calls. We think you should be able to buy a CRM the same way you buy a toothbrush on Amazon, in one click.

A big thank you to our investors, Canaan Partners, Founder Collective and Shine, who know how pervasive this problem is across the software industry.