Today is an exciting milestone in the scoutbee story – having completed a $60 million Series B funding round. Here’s what it means for our future…

To supercharge our mission to transform supplier discovery, we have just closed a substantial Series B round, led by Atomico with participation from Lakestar and Next47, and including existing investors Holtzbrinck Ventures, 42CAP and Toba Capital. 

The investment establishes scoutbee as the fastest growing global SaaS procurement platform and, as part of this, Atomico Partner Hiro Tamura will join the company’s board. The funding means that total investment in scoutbee has grown from $4M to $76M within 12 months – a remarkable achievement.

However, it’s not just having more resources at our disposal that is exciting. Perhaps most exciting is the partnerships we’ve entered into with our investors. Winning the support of Europe’s leading VC funds is a great endorsement, a sign that we’re on a sound foundation, and we’re very honoured to have. Together with them, we will leverage every aspect of our combined instinct, expertise and passion to develop our products and capture new markets. 

scoutbee will use the new investment to grow our scale and innovate in exciting ways. We will further expand our R&D, accelerate customer growth and explore strategic acquisitions. Our already diverse team will be scaled up from 120 staff today to around 220 across Berlin, Wurzburg and Washington D.C. by the end of 2020 (including new roles in engineering, AI / ML, product development, sales and marketing).

Exciting era for digital procurement

More people are recognizing that the potential for digital procurement is huge – private sector companies alone spend trillions annually buying from third-party suppliers. External sourcing is often the largest expense category for companies – on average 43% of total costs (Bain & Company). 

We are also not alone in realizing that scoutbee as a solution is unrivalled in its specific capability for strategic scouting 🙂 We are strongly positioned to capitalize on a surging global procurement software market, currently expected to reach $7.3 billion by 2022 (IDC).

Hiro Tamura, Partner at Atomico, comments,“We are proud to partner with scoutbee’s talented and dedicated team who are focusing on exactly this – a smarter way to find suppliers. We were blown away by their deep knowledge in the procurement space in geographies from Asia, Europe and America, and their product-first approach to solving procurement for the world’s top-tier companies.”

A special thank you – to our customers and team

scoutbee works with amazing customers and suppliers all over the world. From multi-national household names like Audi, Airbus, Caterpillar and Bosch, to smaller niche customers, with each and every one providing us important learnings and enabling the scoutbee platform to evolve and enhance.  We owe a big thank you to our customers for their valuable collaborations, and we always seek to exceed their expectations moving forward!

Today, our team mission is stronger than ever – we continue to attract great talent from all sides of the tech and procurement communities. Asco-founders, we are especially proud of their hard work and dedication to our customers’ success. Our ambition is also stronger than ever and with the support of our talented team we aim to save businesses billions with our intelligent, transparent and fair supplier discovery platform.

Taking scoutbee to a whole new level

It is our commitment that the scoutbee team will work hard to squeeze every ounce of value out of our new investment to help deliver the smarter supplier discovery the world deserves.  We plan to dedicate a significant chunk of this funding to research and development while exploring the best new opportunities to make the scoutbee product even more robust and effective. 

As a final note we’d like to reiterate our thanks to our customers, our investors and the scoutbee team. It is only through your support, dedication, hard work and belief in our vision that we continue to be successful. Thank you and we look forward to a very exciting future with you all.

Gregor, Lee & Fabian