Spend Matters

Synertrade, an S2P suite for the mid-market, has a new owner. It has completed a management-led transaction and now operates as an independent company, backed by a consortium of investors specializing in B2B software platforms The transaction closed March 31, 2026. Laurent Jeanmaire, previously COO, steps up as CEO. Fabien Guionnet becomes COO.

This Spend Matters Vendor Analysis examines Axiom, a UK-based technology provider that offers an enterprise-grade marketplace and tail-spend platform designed to complement existing ERP or source-to-pay (S2P) environments. Founded in 2020 and launched publicly in 2023, Axiom consolidates catalog, free-text and inventory-based purchasing into a single managed marketplace that automates low-value transactions and brings control to the long tail of spend.

Supplier.io has acquired TealBook. Along with the announcement, Supplier.io introduced Atlas, its new vendor master data management solution for which TealBook’s technology serves as the foundation. To understand why this deal makes sense, readers need to understand what each company was actually solving. Supplier.io built its business on supplier intelligence.

Disclaimer: this analysis is based on analyst observations and has not been fact checked by the vendor Direct materials management has been a hot market for a few years now, and the recent events that induced supply chain disruptions added to the attention. Consequently, it also brought solution providers with dedicated capabilities for direct spend under the spotlight. Poland-based Procurence is such a provider.

Disclaimer: this analysis is based on analyst observations and has not been fact checked by the vendor Part 2 of this Vendor Analysis update examines Procurence’s Meercat in greater depth, highlighting its strengths, weaknesses and customer perspectives. Building on part 1, which gave an overview of the platform’s architecture and market positioning, this installment dives into the solution’s core modules, configurability and performance across direct material management.

Since The Hackett Group’s acquisition of Spend Matters last summer, the biggest change for me has been the amount of time I spend with buy-side clients who are making procurement tech selection decisions. Most of the inquiries we receive are about the intake and orchestration market, which is understandable given its growth. I’ve learned a lot about how organizations make decisions and how to best advise them along the way.

Procurement analytics has reached a level of maturity that would have been difficult to imagine even a few years ago. Dashboards, KPIs, benchmarks and standardized reporting are now widely embedded across sourcing, contracting, supplier management and procure-to-pay. Many of these analytics are already actionable at the process level. Users can trigger workflows, intervene in exceptions and monitor performance in near real time.

Spend Matters, a Hackett Group Division, is pleased to announce the 2025-2026 roster for our ‘Future 5’ procurement solution provider list. As in previous editions, our analysts have highlighted five start-ups that excite them the most. This year, the five companies they see as potential future trendsetters are Flowie, Pavus, Tamarin AI, Vallor and Zapro.

After examining the individual execution layers of modern procure to pay (P2P), a consistent pattern emerges. ‘Good’ in P2P today is not defined by isolated advanced features or the presence of AI labels. It is defined by how coherently these layers work together under real operating conditions. Good P2P execution first appears in predictability. Organizations with mature execution do not eliminate exceptions, but they understand them well enough to manage their economics.

As part of our ‘What does good look like in modern procure-to-pay execution’ series, we turn to analytics. Analytics has always been present in procure to pay (P2P), but for most of the platform lifecycle, it has functioned more as a reporting layer than an execution layer. Historically, P2P analytics answered a single primary question: what happened? Dashboards and reports showed spend by category, invoice cycle times, approval bottlenecks and compliance rates.