Editor's note: In our 2024 Startups to Watch feature, the Silicon Valley Business Journal and San Francisco Business Times present startups and founders building groundbreaking products and companies in the Bay Area. Oro Labs is one of 17 we profiled this year — to read more about our mission and the other startups we're featuring, click here.
Sudhir Bhojwani, Lalitha Rajagopalan, and Yuan Tung left SAP to build out even better procurement tools, ones that humanize the procurement processes for enterprise-sized businesses.
That led them to build out ORO Labs and design a system that provides a flexible solution to manage front-end procurement including new procurement requests, supplier onboarding, and compliance checks.
About Oro Labs
- Founded: 2020
- Founders: CEO Sudhir Bhojwani, Lalitha Rajagopalan, Yuan Tung
- Headquarters: Palo Alto
- Employees: 100
- Total funding: $59 million
Can you walk me through ORO? How does it work?
Sudhir Bhojwani: We are trying to create a new category called a procurement orchestration platform that solves the core user experience problem in amazing ways.
Workflow orchestration is very unique. It's not the same as simple approval flows or simple workflow. Our biggest learning moment was finding out that the procurement process is not linear and the current solutions are treating it like a linear business process.
What do you mean when you say the company is humanizing procurement?
Bhojwani: When we say procurement experience humanization, what we're not saying, to be very clear, is just automate everything. What we're saying is, we will bring collaboration, and bring flexibility into the platform to the degree where humans actually feel this adds value, as opposed to another bookkeeping software which they are forced to use. Humanizing means this software will actually guide you. For example: I am a scientist at a pharmaceutical company. It guides me through what am I supposed to do if I want to purchase something, what is most effective. The software should give me the power and the flexibility, while removing tasks that I don't want to do.
