Why we built Lio: a manifesto by CEO Vladimir Keil

Every year, large corporations spend trillions of dollars buying things: raw materials, professional services, IT infrastructure, office supplies, anything.  The volume that flows through enterprise procurement departments is simply staggering. 

At a Fortune 500 company, a single procurement organization might manage tens of thousands of suppliers, hundreds of thousands of transactions, and billions of dollars in annual spend. And yet, despite or because of the huge scale of these efforts, buying something inside one of these companies can take  weeks. 

A purchase request enters the system and passes through layers of approvals, email chains, spreadsheet comparisons, supplier follow-ups, compliance checks, and manual data entry before any final purchases are actually made. Despite incredible advances in AI and software, procurement is still painfully manual: Enterprises spend more than $180 billion each year on procurement talent, and only $10 billion on procurement software.

We’re building Lio to free procurement teams from these painfully manual processes.

To understand why procurement is still so labor-intensive, you need to understand what procurement actually is.

Put yourself in the shoes of a procurement manager at a Fortune 500 company. It’s Monday morning. You have forty open purchase requests on your docket. One is for a specialty chemical that requires hazmat compliance documentation; another is a consulting engagement that needs three competitive bids; and a  third is a rush order for replacement parts where the usual supplier is backordered.

For each of these requests, you’ll need to open the ERP or clunky eProcurement SaaS, check the contract management system, search the supplier database, pull up compliance checklists, cross-reference budget approvals, dig through your email for the latest quotes, and probably visit two or three supplier websites. You’ll read PDFs, compare pricing in spreadsheets, verify that everything meets company policy, and send follow-up emails that might not get replied to until Wednesday. If you’re lucky, then by Friday maybe half that queue has been resolved. Next Monday, there’ll be forty more in your inbox. Is it any wonder why corporate procurement is so slow? 

Each and every one of these decisions requires a huge amount of manual labor – reading documents, comparing options, applying rules, and negotiating with external parties – that all must take place in sequence, with everything dependent on context. It’s a gnarly problem.

Every previous generation of procurement technology was built on the same assumption: that humans will do the work, and technology will help them do it faster. We reject that assumption. Not because we want to eliminate procurement professionals, but because those professionals are wasting their talent on work that machines can now do better.

Lio is a virtual procurement workforce. Our AI agents don’t sit alongside the existing stack as another tool to learn; they operate on top of it – on top of ERPs, systems of record, email, contracts – and execute the same work that human buyers, shared service centers, and BPOs do today. 

We’re building on-top of cutting-edge advances in agentic AI: systems that don’t just answer questions or generate text, but execute multi-step tasks across multiple systems, autonomously, with human-level judgment. An AI agent can read a document, extract relevant information, compare it against rules, make a decision, and take an action.

Lio agents plug into the systems that enterprises use today and simply start executing.

Say that an employee submits a purchase request in natural language. A Lio agent classifies the request, identifies the right category and supplier pool, pulls up relevant contracts and pricing history, requests and analyzes quotes, ensures compliance, routes approvals, negotiates terms, and executes the purchase – in short, it does everything that a human procurement manager is supposed to do. The process that used to take weeks can now be completed in minutes.

Lio’s agents are already managing billions of dollars in enterprise spend across dozens of Global 2000 and Fortune 500 companies – from manufacturers to reinsurers to huge industrial conglomerates. 

We’ve seen 95 percent adoption rates, 85 percent reductions in manual work, 10 percent incremental savings through better sourcing and negotiation, and – what we’re proudest of – 100 percent customer retention. One global manufacturer was able to automate 75 percent of its previously outsourced procurement work in six months, freeing the equivalent of ten full-time employees.

We believe firmly that the procurement organization of the future will scale not through headcount or clunky SaaS, but through perfectly integrated AI agents that execute complex work end-to-end.

Procurement professionals won’t spend their time chasing approvals and comparing spreadsheets. They’ll manage AI workforces that handle all the machine-ready tasks, and focus instead on the strategic decisions that require human judgment.

That is the future that we are building at Lio. And we’re excited to announce our $30 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from SV Angel, Harry Stebbings, and Y Combinator.

We believe that agentic AI is the most important transformation in the history of procurement. A business is only as valuable as the raw materials, the inputs it consumes. Lio is building the AI infrastructure for 100% of enterprise spend.

Thank you for building it with us.

Vladimir Keil, CEO & Co-founder