The Story of Spendflo: The Company Building the Future of SaaS Procurement

The Story of Spendflo: The Company Building the Future of SaaS Procurement

Some companies start with a pitch deck. Others start with a LinkedIn message from an ex-CFO who can’t find a contract you signed two years ago at a company you left a year earlier.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Siddharth Sridharan, CEO and Co-Founder of Spendflo, a SaaS spend management platform that’s raised $15.4 million, shared the story of how a recurring quarterly nightmare became the foundation for a new category at the intersection of SaaS management, spend management, and procurement.

The Quarterly Excel Sheet Ritual

The problem started long before the LinkedIn message. At his previous startup, which scaled from Series A to IPO at breakneck speed, Siddharth had a recurring confrontation with his CFO. “She used to walk up to me every quarter with an Excel sheet and said, this keeps going up, this number keeps going up. Go figure out what it is and go cut it by half,” he recalls.

The solution was always the same: create another Excel sheet. “And then I used to create an excel sheet. Nobody use it. Nobody followed any processes, nobody have any idea where the contracts are. It just kept repeating itself,” Siddharth shares. Nobody’s job was actually to manage the vendors or own the procurement process.

A LinkedIn Message Changes Everything

December 2020. COVID had been raging for nine months. Then came the message. “My ex CFO hit me up and said, sid, you signed this contract a while ago on LinkedIn. She hit me up on LinkedIn and said, where the hell is this? Can you help me with this?” Siddharth recalls. “And by that time, id left the company. Its only been a year. Shes hitting me up a year later about a contract that I signed two years ago.”

“And then I realized, oh, wow, she really needs help,” he says. If his ex-CFO was hunting down former employees on LinkedIn about contracts from two years ago, this wasn’t just a process problem.

Siddharth offered to help. That offer turned into proof of concepts. Those POCs turned into customers. “We signed our first customer in like in the first two months of the business. Very lucky, I remember,” he shares. “And I got married in February 2021, and I was negotiating our first contract on my first night.”

The Category That Didn’t Exist

Early on, nobody knew what to call Spendflo. “A lot of people think where SaaS management that’s existed for a while,” Siddharth explains. “A lot of us think we’re spend management. Everybody would kind of put us in like procurement software and all of that. So we’re in a very unique place where we kind of cross all of these chasms.”

Traditional SaaS management tools discovered shadow IT and showed spending. But they stopped there. No procurement help. No pricing intelligence. No contract management. Meanwhile, procurement tools existed for enterprise but weren’t built for mid-market.

“For those types of companies, a lot of their spend is SAS spend,” Siddharth notes. “They don’t necessarily have procurement software and they don’t really have spend management as well.”

“What we figured out is wed actually have to marry SaaS management, spend management and procurement management into one single place,” Siddharth shares. The category name emerged organically. “And that’s when SAS spend management as a category even came up,” Siddharth recalls. “And it became a category only in 2022, I would say or 2021. 2022 ish.”

But even with a name, “Personally, it’s still a struggle that we face,” he admits.

The Service-Enabled Bet

Spendflo made another bold choice: they wouldn’t just sell software. They’d deliver outcomes, acting as a virtual procurement team with guaranteed savings. “We provide a guaranteed savings on it as well,” Siddharth explains. “That way we’re always budget neutral and we’re actually delivering the outcome rather than just giving you the software and asking you to figure it out.”

“The best part about this model is it’s outcome based,” Siddharth says. “You don’t have issues with traditional issues that you have with software, which is there’s no adoption, there’s no implementation fails.”

But it demanded extreme ICP precision. “You need to be even more specific,” Siddharth warns. “You need to say, hey, what’s the revenue type? What’s the financial structure of that company? What’s the type of Persona who will buy this? At which stage of the company’s life cycle does this actually makes sense?”

From Empty Dinners to Waitlists

The early GTM combined referrals and cold outbound. Then when Rajiv and Divas joined from Freshworks with event marketing expertise, they saw an opportunity. “As were coming out of COVID in 2022, people wanted to be in person,” Siddharth recalls. “They were craving some in person time to be social in late 2022 and early 2023 onwards.”

The beginning was humbling. “The first version of this is me and Rajiv, like showing up to events and then hosting dinners ourselves with nobody showing up,” Siddharth recalls. Today? “And now we have waitlist for our events.”

The Vision: Making Every Dollar Count

Three to five years out, Spendflo’s vision is elegantly simple yet massively ambitious. “What we really want to make sure that every customer that we have, or every customer who works with Penflow, our goal is to make every dollar count for them,” Siddharth explains. “We want to make sure that they’re buying the right thing at the right time and in the right way inside an organization.”

The north star: “A couple of years down the line, we want to become one of the largest, if not the largest, SaaS buyers in the world,” Siddharth shares. Not just a platform that shows spend. Not just software that automates workflows. But the actual entity executing billions in software procurement, with all the pricing intelligence and buying power that creates.

“We want to own that mid market customer base and make them really successful and making sure every dollar counts for them,” Siddharth explains. The platform automates procurement. The service delivers outcomes. Together, they create something no traditional vendor can match.

From a LinkedIn message to negotiating contracts on a wedding night to building a new category, Spendflo’s story shows how the best companies emerge from problems founders lived through themselves. Sometimes you don’t find the category. You create it because the problem is too painful to ignore.