Relish, a software startup in Beachwood, Ohio, has raised $10 million in venture funding to expand its staff and marketing efforts. It will also launch a potentially disruptive artificial intelligence-powered application that has been in development for nearly a year.
The Series A funding came from Boston-based growth-equity firm Volition Capital.
Relish helps to make purchasing systems embedded in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software from platforms like SAP, Coupa and Workday easier to use and more efficient, Ryan Walicki, Relish's founder and CEO, told the Cleveland Business Journal.
Walicki founded Relish in 2020 after spending more than 15 years as a consultant helping clients use their ERP systems.
"Big companies spend tens of millions of dollars on these systems," Walicki said. "And the expectation is that they can do everything. And it's a little unfair because no software can do everything for everybody in every geography in every industry."
Walicki said he doesn't want to replace the SAPs or Workdays of the world — he wants to raise customers' return on investment in the procurement functions of their ERP software.
Large vendors of ERP software "are increasingly leveraging third-party developer ecosystems to fill in critical gaps, and Relish is well-positioned to lead this space," said Roger Hurwitz, Volition Capital's managing partner, in a statement.
"The leadership team understands the industry pain points and has a strong vision for how AI and intelligent-process automation can fundamentally transform procurement," Hurwitz said.
Relish offers its software as a service (SaaS), meaning the company charges a monthly subscription fee to clients that use its applications.
The company's two bestselling applications are Data Secure and Invoice AI.
Data Secure centers on supplier data, Walicki said. When a prospective supplier registers to do business with a buyer, the supplier manually fills out lengthy forms that provide information such as tax identification and bank account numbers. The buyer manually validates this information before adding the supplier to its ERP system.
Data Secure automates the entire process, Walicki said.
"We go out to our sources and automatically validate the bank account" and other information, he said. "So what usually takes someone two weeks to submit a profile, validate it and approve a supplier takes Relish nanoseconds" to do.
Invoice AI, meanwhile, uses AI and machine learning to process clients' invoices.
"We digitally read (the invoices), we digitize them, we put business rules around them and then we submit them to our customers' organization, essentially ready to pay," Walicki said.
Walicki, along with his company's chief technology officer, Alex Lopez, and their colleagues, are working on another app aimed at being "a disruptor in terms of how people interact with software," Walicki said, hinting that disruption will have something to do with voice-to-text and AI.
With its $10 million in new capital, Relish is expected to add six salespeople in new geographies where there is demand for its products, and take its engineering staff to 75 from 60 over the next 12 months, Walicki said.
