Cirtuo’s technology will unlock the full potential of AI-powered category management and sourcing, accelerating Coupa’s autonomous spend management vision and roadmap
FOSTER CITY, Calif., May 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Coupa, the leader in AI-native total spend management, today announced it has acquired Croatia-based Cirtuo, an industry leader in AI-powered category management. This strategic investment accelerates Coupa’s autonomous spend management vision and underscores Coupa’s commitment to developing AI-powered solutions that improve productivity, agility, and resilience while delivering margin impact.
Category managers are under mounting pressure to align procurement strategies and initiatives with enterprise priorities such as sustainability, risk mitigation, and innovation. Recognizing the widening gap between strategic planning and tactical buying, organizations are turning to AI-enabled solutions to bridge productivity and efficiency gaps.
By integrating Cirtuo’s AI-enabled category management capabilities with Coupa’s leading Total Spend Management platform, Coupa is set to deliver a comprehensive solution that seamlessly translates robust, data-driven strategies into sourcing pipelines, supplier actions, and savings realization. This includes supporting the full supplier strategy lifecycle, from strategy planning, to execution, to monitoring, all within a unified system. These new capabilities will help procurement stakeholders not only drive cost reduction and cost avoidance, but extend to deliver a deeper understanding of business needs.
“Transforming the end-to-end procurement process requires reimagining technology’s role. We’re investing heavily in GenAI to automate routine tasks, enhance strategic decision-making, and bring autonomous procurement to market,” said Salvatore Lombardo, Coupa Chief Product and Technology Officer. “With the acquisition of Cirtuo, we strengthen our AI-native solutions and fill a critical gap in Coupa’s Strategic Sourcing Suite. This allows us to deliver a comprehensive category management solution where customers can create margin impact, especially in direct spend categories, by integrating analysis, strategy, and execution in one place.”
“Cirtuo empowers procurement teams to build AI-guided, insight-driven strategies that align with business priorities and flow directly into tactical activities resulting in seamless, closed-loop procurement processes,” said Drasko Jelavic, Cirtuo CEO. “We’re excited to join Coupa as businesses embrace digital transformation in the AI era.”
Making Category Strategies Actionable
Cirtuo’s market leading category management solution continues to be recognized for its pioneering technology by procurement practitioners, technology experts, and customers. Key solutions include:
- Guided Category Strategy:Â Guides users with an interview-style approach to craft holistic category strategies without robust training enabling in-depth spend analysis and actionable insights for data-driven category management.
- Guided Supplier Strategy: Leverage supplier relationships by connecting the dots between category and supplier strategies. Develop strategies that align seamlessly with business requirements and extend the focus on relationship metrics.
- Initiative Management & Value Tracking: Manage your strategic savings, supplier, and risk mitigation initiatives end-to-end with clearly defined tasks, owners, milestones, and timelines to easily demonstrate impact on savings and value tracking.
As a leader in AI-powered category management, Cirtuo has helped some of the world’s biggest and best global brands create real business impact, including Ball Corporation, B.Braun, Molson Coors, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Utz Brands, Walmart, and more. Customers are saying:
- “Cirtuo greatly enhances the category strategies that we’re developing. Cirtuo follows best practices and helps us to be more strategic and get us out of the tactical execution that we are stuck in. It’s easy to use. It’s a no-brainer.” –Â Michael DeWitt, VP of Indirect Spend Management & Center of Excellence, Walmart
- “The digitization of category management is a required and necessary journey. Through Cirtuo Guided Strategy Creation, integrated market intelligence and AI, Cirtuo makes it faster and easier.” –Â Stephane Morel, Procurement Director, ex-Novartis
- “By providing proof-of-impact to BT and capturing the pay-for-performance element of BT Sourced’s total compensation, Cirtuo enables our procurement team to develop high-quality category strategies that generate savings and present new opportunities.” – Cyril Pourrat, Chief Procurement Officer, BT Sourced
Attendees at Coupa’s flagship annual event, Inspire, will have a chance to learn more about the power of combining Coupa and Cirtuo from Cirtuo’s CEO Drasko Jelavic at a dedicated breakout session and in the Expo Hall. Learn more about cirtuo.com and coupa.com.
Learn more about how you can master spend and cost management without sacrificing growth.
Kaizen Equity Partners served as financial advisor to Cirtuo. Kirkland & Ellis and Wolf Theiss served as legal counsel to Coupa.
About Coupa
Coupa is the leader in AI-native total spend management. Using its trusted, community-generated, $8 trillion dataset, Coupa brings autonomous AI agents, a network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers, and leading apps together on one unified platform to seamlessly automate the buying process and connect to customers in a whole new way. With Coupa, you’ll make margins multiply™. Learn more at coupa.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).
About Cirtuo
Cirtuo is the pioneer in digital category management and strategy creation. Based on the original consulting blueprint for category management and refined in countless client workshops, Cirtuo distills the insights from hundreds of category strategies across global and local procurement organizations and spend categories into one digital consultant: Cirtuo Guided Strategy Creation™ Pro. Cirtuo supports over 5,000 category managers of leading national and multinational companies like Siemens Energy, Boeing, Walmart, Novartis, Molson Coors, or British Telecom across industries and 40+ countries in creating business-centric and actionable category and supplier strategies that deliver unparalleled impact and value.
SOURCE Coupa Software