Coupa Inspire 2025 - Coupa acquires Cirtuo to bring AI smarts to buyer category management

Spend management vendor Coupa yesterday announced it has acquired Cirtuo, described as "an industry leader in AI-powered category management." This is Coupa's first acquisition after it was taken private two years ago by PE giant Thoma Bravo.

Category management is an often highly manual or ad-hoc process in which buyers analyze and plan sourcing and procurement. Briefing diginomica ahead of the news, Leagh Turner, CEO of Coupa, tells us the acquisition is really about strengthening its offering in strategic sourcing. She explains:

Let's stop calling it category management. What it really is, is strategic sourcing through to validation in one system, meaning: 'What are my options? How do I prioritize them? Under what conditions would they need to be true? Once I execute on them, did I make the right decisions?' That's what we're trying to do.

Applying Cirtuo's AI-based digital system brings the ability to do that analysis in real time and dynamically respond to changing circumstances. She goes on:

During a time of volatility, every single one of our customers is saying, 'I don't want to do category management episodically. What I want to do is strategic category management, strategic thinking and validating of my strategic thought, in near-real time against my full buyer business process. Can I do that?' And the answer in Coupa was, not really. So we're effectively buying, I'll call it a thin slice of technology and some really good skills to be able to enhance that side of our business process.

Cirtuo, based in Croatia, has built up a blue-chip customer list including names such as aluminum manufacturer Ball Corporation, brewer Molson Coors, pharmaceutical giants Johnson & Johnson and Novartis, snack food company Utz Brands, and retail giant Walmart. Its AI-driven solution helps buyers digitally manage sourcing and procurement, by supporting categorization and analysis of their spend strategies and supplier selection. Among the customer testimonials quoted in Coupa's press release, Walmart's Michael DeWitt, VP of Indirect Spend Management & Center of Excellence, sums up the attraction. He comments:

Cirtuo greatly enhances the category strategies that we're developing. Cirtuo follows best practices and helps us to be more strategic and get us out of the tactical execution that we are stuck in. It's easy to use. It's a no-brainer.

While this is Coupa's first acquisition since going private, Turner says that the company is looking at other potential acquisition targets, particularly on the supplier business process side, as part of its roadmap towards fully automating sourcing and spend by creating an agentic network for collaborative commerce. She adds:

This is a company with a ton of liquidity. We can go out and make acquisitions. We're ready and willing and able to do that, but only those that allow us to pull off that vision of being the future of trade, and a network that enables buyers and suppliers to come together and act autonomously. And if we can do that, we're going to buy up good technology and good people.

Blurring the boundaries

To coincide with the vendor's annual Inspire conference this week in Las Vegas, it has announced new agents, advances in supplier collaboration, and other steps towards that vision of autonomous collaborative commerce. The goal is to eliminate much of the inefficiency and duplicated effort that occurs in global trade today — a half-trillion-dollar opportunity, says Turner, quoting McKinsey research on the extent of that inefficiency among both buyers and sellers. She believes Coupa is uniquely placed due to the agreements it has in place with the overwhelming majority of its customers to share data. She explains:

If you're going to apply an agentic workforce to a data flow, you actually need to have access, use rights, to that data. That is a unique advantage at Coupa, which is 19 years of trusted use of data, servicing accurate recommendations, [with] no external data, therefore the data integrity is very high, and 100% access rights.

What is the data? The data is contracts, purchase orders, sales orders, goods receipts, delivery notices, across global multinationals who have traded with 10 million suppliers over the course of a 19-year period. So there's patterns everywhere. That is an advantage in a world where there will be a blurring of jurisdictional lines across these agents — and the only thing that matters for those agents is the basis of knowledge. The higher quality data you can train them on, the faster they get smart and capable of making good decisions.

At a time when AI is blurring the traditional boundaries between enterprise applications, she believes Coupa's data access gives it an unparalleled opportunity to deliver its vision of a platform where autonomous agents will collaborate on behalf of both buyers and sellers. She elaborates:

if you think about it, what will we have in the future? The application layer will thin out. The data will continue to grow. Ours compounds by about $1.3 trillion a year. We will have an agentic layer that simply works across that growing data store to surface recommendations to both sides of the network. That's all we'll do.

Those recommendations will be made based on matching conditions — preferences on one side, preferences on another. Preferences can be regulations, they can be price, they can be quantity, they can be jurisdiction. But based on those preferences, those agents will know what's available, and we'll be able to match.

That's the direction that we're headed. We think we're super uniquely qualified to be able to do it, because we have $8 trillion worth of training information for those agents.

My take

Go to any enterprise tech vendor event these days and you'll hear about their plans for agentic AI. But the scope and detail of Coupa's plans are exceptional. It's a stark contrast with the dynamic at last year's Inspire, when Turner had the task of introducing herself as the recently appointed CEO at this previously founder-led vendor. This year, she and her leadership colleagues have returned with an ambitious plan for Coupa's future, and a commitment to invest in acquisitions and continued product development to make it happen.