🤝 Insight Partners $54m investment in Procurement disruptor Pactum - Asymmetrix Newsletter #71
More AI-led back office disruption
We’ve spent a lot of time in the past looking at the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Legal sector, through AI-first businesses such as Harvey.
This week, in the wake of Pactum’s $54m Series C, we are digging into the impact of AI on the world of Supply Chain Data & Analytics.
There were 6 disclosed acquisitions, with a total estimated EV of $188m, and 8 investments were announced, with a total estimated EV of $614m.
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📈 Acquisition and Investment activity - June 9-13, 2025
There were 6 disclosed acquisitions, with a total estimated EV of $188m.
8 investments were announced, with a total estimated EV of $614m.
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🤝 - AI procurement provider Pactum raises $54m led by Insight Partners
We have not previously discussed Supply Chain Data & Analytics in much detail.
So when we saw that Pactum, an AI-powered autonomous negotiation platform for enterprise procurement and vendor management, had announced its $54m Series C funding last week, led by global venture capital firm Insight Partners, we thought this was a great opportunity to dig into this large and growing sector.
Founded in 2019 by Kaspar Korjus, Martin Rand, and Kristjan Lepik, Pactum has grown rapidly by addressing a fundamental inefficiency between enterprises and vendors: the inability to consistently and scalably optimise long-tail supplier contracts.
Pactum’s technology uses AI agents and its growing dataset of negotiation behavioural learnings to autonomously negotiate contracts on behalf of large corporations.
Unlike typical procurement software, which digitises workflows but still relies on human-led negotiation, Pactum sits at the frontier of applied agentic AI, blending a huge proprietary dataset with clients’ own data.
Pactum’s platform engages vendors via AI bots that autonomously negotiate within predefined parameters, continuously refining outcomes based on a proprietary, large-scale dataset of live market and historical negotiation data.
This enables benchmarking against current market pricing and informed decision-making, with insights fed back into enterprise systems.
Pactum performs work that was previously very time-consuming - including vendor negotiation at scale, especially across ‘long-tail spend’ where profit margins are reduced by unmanaged contracts. For customers including Walmart and Maersk, this has directly led to higher margins and lower friction.
Pactum had previously raised $20m in Series B and $11m in Series A funding from investors including Karma Ventures, Atomico, and Maersk, and total funding is now in excess of $100m.
Why it matters
Pactum’s Series C reflects growing investor interest in AI-native enterprise applications, particularly those with practical uses in back-office processes like procurement, where automation can deliver measurable ROI fast.
Insight Partners’ lead role in the funding round reflects a wider strategic belief in the supply chain sector. According to Gartner, the global supply chain management software market size is forecast to reach $62bn by 2028, up from $33.8bn in 2024. And procurement, once a back-office function, is becoming a key tool for resilience, savings, and ESG performance.
Having said this, procurement departments have recently faced rising inflation, geopolitical risk, and CFO pressure to deliver cost reductions without headcount increases. But Pactum has grown, in spite of, or perhaps because of, these headwinds, as its solution reduces procurement costs.
This investment also follows a steady trend by financial sponsors of funding Supply Chain Data & Analytics firms, including:
E2open - taken private by Insight Partners in 2015, then relisted via a SPAC in 2021 and acquired by WiseTech last month for $2.1bn;
Sphera - acquired by Blackstone in 2021 for $1.4bn, and currently being sold in a process run by investment banks William Blair and Evercore, who are seeking c.$3bn for the business;
RapidRatings - took a $200m growth investment led by Spectrum Equity in 2022.
What happens next?
While it could make sense for Pactum to acquire datasets of supply chain data to enhance their own dataset, there is a gap in valuation multiples between AI-first businesses like Pactum, and traditional Data & Analytics and software players.
While there is a tendency for traditional players to hope that an AI white knight will ride in and pay an AI-type multiple for their business, this has not been the case to date.
We can expect to see other AI-driven procurement providers receive backing from investors. While the market is still nascent, private providers like Statworx are emerging and may well mop up funding in due course..
As enterprises continue to look for ways to automate routine processes without compromising control, Pactum’s approach to intelligent negotiation has the potential to become a core layer in modern procurement stacks. The question now is how fast vendors in enterprise procurement respond. Pactum, with new capital, growing revenue, and a clear product-market fit, might be the standard against which they measure themselves.
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📧 If you would like to talk, please email us at a.boden@asymmetrixintelligence.com