Vladimir Keil

The procurement software industry is selling theater, not transformation. Everyone's launching "AI agents" now. Everyone's got a copilot. But here's the honest truth: most vendors are slapping AI features on top of legacy software and calling it innovation. A tool that helps a buyer write an email 5% faster? That's not an agent. That's a spell-checker with marketing budget. There's a massive difference between a feature that assists and a system that acts. A copilot helps you do your job. An agent replaces the work entirely. And the market is drowning in copilot theater. @Lio_Technology doesn't assist procurement teams. It executes. Our agents don't help buyers write RFQs, but they autonomously manage sourcing, negotiation, PO generation, order confirmation, invoice matching. They deploy on your existing ERP without rip-and-replace. They cover the entire end-to-end P2P process. The numbers tell the story: 95% adoption rate 85% reduction in manual work 10% incremental savings 93% reduction in BPO costs 100% customer retention Enterprises spend $180B+ annually on procurement talent and ~$10B on procurement software. The problem isn't lack of tools. It's that the tools don't actually do the work. They just add another layer of busy work on top of it. We're managing billions in enterprise spend across Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. Our agents are working right now, executing sourcing decisions, negotiating contracts, generating POs. Not assisting. Acting. The shift from "helpful dashboard" to "working agent" isn't incremental. It's a new operating model. If you're still evaluating procurement software based on UI polish and feature lists, you're missing the point. Ask your vendor this: does your system execute the work, or does it help people execute the work? If the answer is the latter, you're looking at copilot theater. 👉 DM me if you want to see what actual agentic execution looks like in procurement.

That’s a wrap at Shared Services & Outsourcing Week in Orlando. This fair just celebrated its 30th anniversary. To be honest, I am not sure how many will come after that. Why? Because the shared services model is under massive pressure. The roadmap of the past three decades looked more or less like this: If a process is repetitive, move it to a shared service center. If it still doesn’t scale, add more people. That model propably made sense in a world where humans had to execute the work. But with Agentic AI, that’s becoming a thing of the past. My take on the future of shared service centers: they won’t disappear. But their role will change. A lot. They won’t manage thousands of operators. They’ll have a strong workforce consisting of thousands of AI agents. There will be smaller teams, yet higher leverage. And trust me, that shift won’t take another 30 years to happen. It has already begun. If we didn’t get a chance to chat at SSOW, let’s change that now. Comment to discuss how Lio saves you 93% of your BPO costs.

We were named one of the Top 100 Rising European Startups by @VivaTech! One of our key missions at @Lio_Technology is to put Munich, Germany and even Europe back on the map again, as true AI leader. That’s what unites us with the 99 other companies selected. Special thanks to @Accel, @eurazeo, HV Capital, @northzoneVC and Partech for this initiative. My personal take: we need more ambitious AI companies out there. Focussed not on supporting work, but getting work done. And we’re building one. Wanna build it with us? Apply now: lio.ai/about-us

We are proud to work with @ScheidtBachmann, one of the leading providers of innovative system solutions for mobile living. With their unique portfolio, they ensure that millions of people and goods stay in motion worldwide. If you thought “Only startups are innovative”, you got it wrong. Our customer Scheidt & Bachmann has been around for more than 150 years. It’s one of the market leaders in its industry. And on March 3, 2026, it made a decision about the future of procurement. What we built together: Buyers now work with an AI agent. No more routine tasks, just focus on what really matters. Requesters no longer create purchase requisitions directly in SAP. They simply describe what they need. The AI handles the mapping, points out items already in stock, guides them through special processes, with only a minimal number of fields. A true relief in day-to-day work. That’s guided buying the way it should feel. 150 years of market expertise. Plus Lio. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the whole point. Being established and being innovative are not mutually exclusive. It just takes the courage to get started. Congratulations on the go-live to Kristina Huff, Bernard B., Livia Lembeck, Jens Poplar, Lazaros Tampakis, Leon Schmidt and Arne Schmidt 🎉 At @Lio_Technology, we empower the world’s leading businesses with AI agents that fundamentally transform procurement. We simplify buying, automate operations, scale savings, supercharge buyers, and finally give procurement teams their time and purpose back. When will you reclaim yours?

Next week I’ll be at Shared Services & Outsourcing Week hosted by @ssonetwork! Shared services and outsourcing are the go-to answer for scaling operational work in large enterprises. For real? If a process is repetitive and time-consuming: move it to a shared service center. Just outsource it. Add more processes. Or add more people. Seriously? Am I the only one surprised that this is not working? The economics of operational work are changing fast. With Agentic AI, workflows that were traditionally handled by large operational teams can now be executed by software, including: ▪️ Sourcing processes ▪️ Supplier research ▪️ Negotiations ▪️ Contract workflows Let me emphasize this again: we’re not talking about these processes being assisted by AI. We’re talking about them being actually executed by AI. If you are ready to bring procurement back to speed and finally deliver real ROI, let’s connect. The future of enterprise operations will look very different from the past.

Celebrating our Series A announcement at 35,000 feet ✈️ Having just closed one of the biggest funding rounds in history with no other than @a16z is one thing. Having our clients reaching out to congratulate us is amazing. But what happened here, on a plane, with our team on it heading to the US is beyond words. It was one of those slightly surreal founder moments. You spend years building something, and most of the time it feels like progress is happening very quietly. Then suddenly, the breakthrough is there. And you realize the hard work you (and your f-ing amazing team) put in there finally starts to show. Procurement may not be the sexiest field to operate in. But it surely is one of the most important ones. Great to finally see @Lio_Technology getting the recognition it deserves. Huge thanks to the flight crew for making an already exciting moment even more memorable. It’s a privilege to work with the tier 1 global players in the aviation industry. And if you’re joining the ride just now: the best part of the journey is still ahead. 👇 A few impressions from that moment.

Just wrapped up a few intense days at @ProcureCon West in Las Vegas. One thing became very clear: the industry knows change is coming. But are enterprises ready for it? Apparently not. Almost every CPO I spoke with described the same tension. On one side: growing complexity in supplier networks and compliance requirements. On the other: teams spending huge amounts of time on operational work, driving them close to burnout. Good news is: none of these procurement leaders believe this is the best way to work. They just got digitalization wrong. Your company is not future-ready just because you use shared Excels and shift sourcing and negotiating to an online environment. The even better news I shared with them: help is on the way. Agentic AI like the one we’re building at @Lio_Technology has software moving away from merely supporting procurement work to actually executing procurement workflows. And suddenly, your entire operating model changes. Procurement teams don’t just become more efficient, but strategically more powerful. Huge thanks to everyone who stopped by to challenge ideas, share their perspective, and debate where the industry is heading. If we didn’t get a chance to connect in Las Vegas, or if you want to go deeper into how this works in practice, our team at Lio would love to continue the conversation. Let’s explore together how Agentic AI can transform procurement in your organization. Questioning old assumptions shouldn’t stop when the conference ends. 🗣️ Continue it here: lio.ai/demo

Yesterday we gave a behind-the-scenes look at Lio for students from two initiatives that are close to my heart: @STARTmunich and TUM.ai. Close because I came through one of them myself, and have been part of programs like Manage and More by UnternehmerTUM. And because a good chunk of our team came through one of these communities too. That's not a coincidence. Programs like these attract people who don't just want to study how industries work. They want to change how they work. That's the kind of energy you need when you're building something like Lio. The talent density and entrepreneurial drive is high! We showed the group what we're actually working on: how we're using Agentic AI to rethink procurement from the ground up. Not the polished version. The real thing. The hard problems, the messy parts, and why it's worth spending your career on them. The conversations afterward were some of the best we've had in a while. Smart questions, real curiosity, zero bullshit. Sounds just like you? Then check out our open positions here: lio.ai/about-us or reach out directly to our talent team at @Lio_Technology. We are excited to meet you.

From today you’ll find me in Las Vegas at ProcureCon West 🚀 ProcureCon brings together CPOs and procurement leaders to discuss how the industry is evolving. But I am not here to simply discuss. I’m here to speak a very uncomfortable truth: Procurement doesn’t have a talent problem. It has a technology problem. Most procurement teams I meet are incredibly capable. But they’re still spending huge amounts of time on work that shouldn’t exist anymore. They’re not doing this because they want to, but because the systems they’re given leave them no choice. Or worse: because their organization is still clinging to the “old ways”. For the last 20 years, the answer to scaling procurement has been: add another tool, add another process, add more headcount. That model doesn’t scale. Agentic AI does. @Lio_Technology does. Instead of software that organizes work, we’re now building systems that execute work. This is the conversation I wanna have with procurement leaders this week. With those understanding the significance of this industry shift. 👉 If you’re at ProcureCon West as well, let’s talk. Las Vegas is a good place to question old assumptions. Especially the ones running trillion-dollar enterprise functions.

The announcement of our $30M Series A was met with an overwhelming response. And from the bottom of my heart, I wanna say: Thank you. To our investors, partners, team members, and everyone who has supported us along the way. The messages, calls, and comments meant a lot. We’re grateful for the trust and the encouragement. 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 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 these companies can take weeks. We’re building Lio to free procurement teams from dragging processes. 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 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. 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 @a16z , with participation from @svangel, @HarryStebbings, and @ycombinator. 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. Read the full manifesto on the vision of Lio here: lio.ai/newsroom/why-w… Missed the announcement? See below.

@0xEtherpop that's the plan! ❤️‍🔥

@askvladi Lio's execution layer potential just got real, huge implications for procurement scalability. 🚀

Announcing Lio's $30M Series A, led by Andreessen Horowitz! Procurement still operates like an administrative back-office function: rigid software, manual workflows and endless headcount. Enterprises spend over $180 billion annually on procurement talent and roughly $10 billion on procurement software, yet the problem persists. More software hasn't solved it. More hiring won't either. Introducing @Lio_Technology (formerly askLio) the world's first multi-agent system for procurement. Our virtual workforce is already deployed at some of the world's largest enterprises, taking over the manual work that buries buyers, shared service centers, and BPOs today. But Lio doesn't just do the same job - it does work that was never humanly possible: renegotiating every contract, sourcing across every category, and preparing as well as analyzing every negotiation, all at once. Lio's AI agents operate on top of existing procurement software and ERPs - no rip-and-replace - autonomously executing workflows end to end. The results speak for themselves: -   95% adoption rate -   85% reduction in manual work -   10% incremental savings -   100% customer retention Lio isn't a dashboard or a copilot. It's the execution layer for enterprise procurement. As one Head of Procurement put it: "Lio is a cheaper, more scalable, and faster-to-onboard alternative to outsourcing." 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. This raise accelerates our US expansion and the growth of our agent ecosystem as we build the infrastructure powering AI-driven procurement. A huge thank you to our incredible team, customers, and advisors. Proud to have outstanding investors on board: the round was led by @a16z - special thanks to @seema_amble - with participation from SV Angel, @HarryStebbings, @ycombinator, and a group of leading procurement executives and successful founders. Additional thanks to @BKRoberts, @arampell, @jamdac, @zephratic and @t_blom. Whether as an enterprise partner or a new team member — join our mission now!

@farman_kazj @ycombinator exactly this!

@dayvough @Lio_Technology thank you!

@askvladi Congrats @askvladi and @Lio_Technology!

@jamdac Oh yes!!

@askvladi Let's go!!!

@rafliazrial @Lio_Technology sure thing!

@askvladi Congrats to the @Lio_Technology Team! A good start, this is just the beginning.

@ExcitingTimeNow working on it ;-)

@askvladi Love it! I firmly believe that 85% of procument can be automated today. 95% tomorrow ;)

@arvindakaraja we sure hope so!

@askvladi Congratulations this will be game changing to the adopters

@GlobalRabbi thank you!

@askvladi Congrats!! Well deserved

@ninadwrites @ycombinator oh yes we are!

@AndreaShuyuWang thank you!

@askvladi Congrats team! Thrilled to partner with you