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Our Investment in Kodiak Hub
Imagine you’re a Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) or strategic sourcing manager overseeing a vast, global supply chain with hundreds of key suppliers spread across different regions. As always, you need to find the best value for money suppliers out there. These days, you feel pulled in many directions at once as you evaluate which supplier can bring the highest value. Not only do you need to source high quality products, but they must also be sustainable and arrive reliably from low-risk suppliers with good track records of collaboration. Is it better to stick to your existing supplier and work with them to improve the product, or is it worth it to switch to a new one?
These are the daily decisions that occupy the minds of strategic sourcing teams. Unfortunately, the traditional tools to manage a global supplier base – Excel sheets, ERP systems or Procure-to-Pay suites – provide inadequate support for these tasks, lacking the flexibility and depth necessary to support this decision-making.
Kodiak Hub addresses these needs head-on. An emerging leader in the Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) category, Kodiak Hub empowers procurement teams to onboard, assess, and monitor suppliers effectively, transforming supplier data into actionable insights. Kodiak Hub’s platform enables CPOs to centralise all of their supplier data across myriad dimensions, providing them with necessary visibility and transparency across the supplier base. With Kodiak Hub, procurement teams also collect supplier performance data, enabling teams to reduce risks and optimise supplier performance. For sectors like manufacturing, where supplier quality is critical to overall company outcomes, Kodiak is becoming the SRM platform of choice.
Supplier Relationship Management’s Role in the Expanding Procurement Tech Space
Oxx has been closely watching the procurement sector closely over the past few years. Historically, procurement has been an underdigitised function and procurement teams have been tasked solely with reducing supplier costs. Recent developments have started breaking down that paradigm, exposing the weakness of relying on manual solutions or tactically-oriented software to make strategic decisions in a complex environment. This is driving increased software adoption in procurement, and the overall procurement software category is growing over 15% each year.
There’s broad consensus that supply chain shocks and increasing regulatory burdens to evaluate supplier risk and sustainability has been one of the key drivers to this shift. These regulatory shifts are not only present in Europe – companies face increasing requirements to contract with diverse suppliers in the US, for example. Especially in industries with a high share of direct spend (spending on materials, components or services that become part of a product or offering a company sells), these market shifts have shown companies the strategic importance of reducing supplier risk and improving performance to deliver better products. As Gartner puts it, “as procurement’s remit expands beyond a focus on cost and productivity, goals around supplier enablement have emerged, including sustainability, diversity and risk.”
The impact is clear. As one CPO we spoke with told us, “since we’ve now gotten pretty far on the cost savings side, we can support the business units with getting the most out of their suppliers. When I started, I never spoke with the CEO; now I speak to the CEO on a weekly basis.”
To achieve this goal, companies need better supplier visibility. This has driven supplier relationship management (SRM) to become one of the top spending priorities for CPOs. While many companies have some SRM functionality in their existing ERP or Procure-to-Pay suite, these modules are not well built to deal for companies with more advanced needs because supplier performance, innovation and sustainability data tends to be unstructured. As one market expert explained, “the companies that succeed will be the ones that centralise supplier data, carry out supplier quality management and auditing, and handle contracts all in one platform, because managing these in an ERP is a nightmare.”
About Kodiak Hub
Enter Kodiak Hub. Founded in Stockholm, Sweden, Kodiak Hub offers a Supplier Relationship Management platform to companies with global & complex supply chains where quality and sustainability matter. The platform allows strategic procurement leaders to onboard, assess, and analyse suppliers across risk, sustainability, and performance metrics. Kodiak Hub wraps this together in a single, holistic supplier scorecard – at last providing strategic sourcing managers full supplier visibility in a single dashboard. One thing we’ve been particularly impressed by is Kodiak Hub’s clever approach to combine a high degree of customer-led configuration and platform modularity together with out-of-the-box software packaging.
How does it do this? Kodiak Hub has built out what we see as the most advanced supplier performance module in the industry. Historically, one of the challenges in incorporating supplier performance to supplier evaluations is that a supplier with high performance for one customer may have low performance with another. To solve this, the company has built out an extensive global library of supplier performance metrics and a highly extensible data model. This allows Kodiak Hub’s customers to adapt the supplier ratings to their own needs and internal processes.
Another thing that impressed us with the company was Kodiak Hub’s recognised leadership position within the procurement analyst community. For three consecutive years, Kodiak has been included in the prestigious ProcureTech100 list as one of a handful of top SRM vendors. For two years in a row, SpendMatters has named it among the Top 50 Vendors to Watch in procurement.
Kodiak Hub has been able to reach this prominence in large part due to the vision and resilience of its founder, Malin Schmidt. Malin recognised very early that more sustainable modes of operating supply chains would become mission critical long before the supply chain disruptions of Covid arrived. Her previous entrepreneurial experience and her domain expertise gave her a keen understanding of procurement leaders' needs and the gaps in existing solutions. Simply put, her insight was that while the strategic buyer is one of the most powerful people in global supply chains - they’re calling the shots - they’re woefully under-resourced in their ability to take sustainability, resilience and risk into account.
As Oxx has subsequently followed the company, we have had the privilege to see how the company has successfully internationalised its operations and taken the first step to realise its ambitions on the global stage. Today, over 75% of Kodiak’s revenue comes from outside the Nordics, with the company counting Germany and the UK as major markets. Recognising this potential, we’re delighted to announce that Oxx has led a 70 MSEK financing round in Kodiak Hub, positioning it for further international growth.
What’s next for Kodiak Hub
Just as in every other software sector, AI is an omnipresent discussion topic in procurement these days. Kodiak Hub has collected a unique database on supplier performance and is leveraging this to build out predictive supplier performance analytics.
Finally, as companies increasingly adopt supplier risk, supplier sustainability and supplier compliance solutions, the SRM category is perfectly situated to become the strategic “data cockpit” for organisations looking for a single, comprehensive ability to manage strategic supplier relationships.
