Lio secures $30M from Andreessen Horowitz and investors to streamline enterprise procurement

Lio’s founders understand from direct experience that procurement — the process large companies use to buy services from vendors — often becomes a major source of delay. Vladimir Keil, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, encountered this issue first while working inside a major enterprise and later again when building his first company.

“When we were selling enterprise software, we had to go through procurement ourselves and saw how manual and fragmented the process still is,” he said. Keil and his team have since created an automated platform of AI agents — software systems designed to carry out tasks on behalf of humans — to address some of those broken and disconnected workflows.

On Thursday, Lio announced a $30 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. SV Angels, Harry Stebbings, and Y Combinator also participated in the financing round. Lio was part of YC’s Spring ’23 batch. The company has now raised $33 million in total funding. Keil said the new capital will be used to expand the company across the United States and to improve the capabilities of Lio’s AI agents, which are intended to handle the full procurement process for enterprise clients.

Procurement sits at the centre of enterprise spending, where businesses need to purchase everything from raw materials to professional services. Every purchase order requires close attention and follow-through: someone typically needs to open the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, review contract management systems, search supplier databases, conduct compliance checks, compare against budgets, sift through emails, and more.

“Even with modern eProcurement software, most of the real work is still done manually,” Keil said. As a result, companies are often forced to build large in-house teams or outsource these tasks, making the process slow and costly. Keil saw an opportunity in that problem — if procurement largely involves unstructured data and repetitive workflows, then it is exactly the kind of work AI agents should handle.

He joined forces with friends Lukas Heinzmann and Till Wagner, and in 2023, the three launched Lio as a virtual procurement workforce. The company runs an AI-native platform with agentic infrastructure designed to complete the entire procurement cycle.

“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,” Keil said. “We take a fundamentally different approach. Instead of building software to help humans do procurement work faster, Lio deploys AI agents that execute the workflow themselves.”

These Lio agents work across enterprise systems and on top of them to read documents, assess suppliers, negotiate terms, andfinalisee transactions. “Processes that once took weeks can now be completed in minutes,” Keil said, adding that the startup is already helping companies manage billions of dollars in enterprise spending. “In one case, a global manufacturer was able to automate 75% of its previously outsourced procurement operations within six months.”

Lio is one of a growing number of startups that have emerged to rethink enterprise software, helped by agentic AI’s ability to reshape how enterprise applications function fundamentally.

Keil sees Lio’s competition as legacy procurement software providers such as SAP Ariba and Oracle, as well as Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms and consulting companies that help enterprises run these operations.

“Instead of spending most of their time processing requests and paperwork, teams can run more negotiations, analyse more suppliers, and capture savings opportunities that would otherwise be missed,” Keil said. “In the long run, we think this changes procurement from a back-office function into a much more powerful lever for enterprise performance.”