Lio Lands $30M from Andreessen Horowitz to Automate Corporate Procurement

Lio's co-founders have seen firsthand how enterprise procurement — the process of purchasing services from vendors — often becomes a major bottleneck. Vladimir Keil, the company's co-founder and CEO, encountered this issue both as an employee at a large corporation and later while founding his first startup.

"When we were selling enterprise software, we had to navigate the procurement process ourselves and saw how manual and fragmented it still is," he told TechCrunch. Keil and his team have developed an automated platform powered by AI agents — software that performs tasks on behalf of humans — to streamline these disjointed processes.

On Thursday, Lio announced a $30 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. SV Angels, Harry Stebbings, and YC also participated (Lio was part of the Spring '23 YC batch). To date, the company has raised $33 million. Keil stated the new capital will be used to expand Lio's U.S. presence and enhance the capabilities of its AI agents, which are designed to manage the entire procurement cycle for enterprise clients.

Procurement sits at the core of corporate spending, covering everything from raw materials to professional services. Each purchase order demands significant attention: typically requiring teams to access Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, review contract management systems, search supplier databases, conduct compliance checks, verify budgets, sift through emails, and more.

"Even with modern e-procurement software, most of the actual work is still done manually," Keil explained to TechCrunch. This forces companies to either build large internal teams or outsource the work, leading to a slow and costly process. Keil realized that since procurement largely involves unstructured data and repetitive workflows, it is an ideal task for AI agents to handle.

He joined forces with friends Lukas Heinzman and Till Wagner, and in 2023 the trio launched Lio—a virtual procurement workforce. Lio operates an AI-native platform with agentic infrastructure that executes the complete procurement process.

"Every previous generation of procurement technology was built on the same assumption: that humans would do the work, and technology would just help them do it faster," Keil said. "We take a fundamentally different approach. Instead of building software to help humans work faster, Lio deploys AI agents that execute the workflow autonomously."

Lio's agents integrate with existing enterprise systems to read documents, evaluate suppliers, negotiate terms, and finalize transactions. "Processes that once took weeks can now be completed in minutes," Keil noted, adding that the startup is already helping companies manage billions in corporate spending. "In one case, a global manufacturer automated 75% of its previously outsourced procurement operations within six months."

Lio is part of a growing wave of companies redefining enterprise software, leveraging agentic AI to fundamentally transform how business applications operate.

Keil views Lio's main competitors as legacy procurement software vendors (like SAP Ariba and Oracle), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers, and consulting firms that assist with procurement operations.

"Instead of spending most of their time processing requests and paperwork, teams can now run more negotiations, analyze more suppliers, and capture savings opportunities that would otherwise be missed," Keil explained. "Long term, we believe this transforms procurement from a back-office function into a powerful driver of enterprise performance."