Coupa


Coupa Software is a global technology platform for Business Spend Management. The company is headquartered in San Mateo, California with offices throughout Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. The company helps large companies gain visibility into, and control over, the money and resources spent within their organizations. Main competitors in this arena include Tradeshift, Ariba, Tipalti and Ivalua, Inc.
In 2018, the company was named a leader in multiple IDC MarketScape Assessments including: Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Procurement Applications, Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Travel and Expense, and Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Sourcing Applications. The company was certified as a “Great Place to Work” by the Great Place to Work organization and was most recently recognized as one of the highest rated public cloud computing companies to work for in a new list released by Battery Ventures, a global investment firm, and Glassdoor, one of the world's largest job and recruiting sites.
In June 2018, Coupa was awarded top seed in Garter's Magic Quadrant for P2P suites.
In May 2018, Coupa and The Economist Intelligence Unit released the report, “The Strategic CFO in a Rapidly Changing World,” which found that of Chief financial officers surveyed by The Economist Intelligence Unit, the majority lacked visibility into corporate spend.
The company was founded in 2006 by Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner. Stephens and Eisner previously worked at Oracle. Rob Bernshteyn joined Coupa as CEO in February 2009 after serving as Vice President of Global Product Marketing and Management at SuccessFactors, Inc. Former Yahoo CEO and PayPal president Scott Thompson joined the company's board of directors in April 2013.

Technology

Coupa's Cloud Spend Optimization SaaS product manages indirect purchases, invoices and expenses in real-time. Built on Coupa's cloud architecture, it provides executive dashboards, alerts, expense management and real-time benchmarking into a single user interface. This spend optimization software suite focuses on three core spend areas including procurement, accounts payable, and expense management.
Coupa is cloud-based and built on Amazon Web Services infrastructure. In 2007, the company launched a SaaS product called Coupa On Demand for SMBs. This platform uses Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud Web services.
Coupa's software is based on the Ruby on Rails platform. With RoR, Coupa developed software that helps companies to better monitor costs with less implementation time and employee training In 2006, its first free open-source product, Coupa Express, was built using RoR. Coupa's application can be accessed by any user via their mobile device browser.
In November 2011, Coupa released its first spend analysis product called Coupa Spend Optimizer. According to Coupa, this product provides spending insight to employees in both the procurement and finance sectors, with its easy-to-use interface. Also, users have access to data from other platforms, like ERP or HR systems, so they have a broader understanding of spend across their companies.
In August 2012, Coupa added an application called Coupa Contracts to its software suite. Companies can use the contracts repository to access their approved contracts and to leverage their negotiated pricing at the time of purchasing.
In May 2013, Coupa introduced applications Coupa Sourcing and Coupa Catalogs. The former makes it easier for companies to run sourcing events with suppliers to save money. With Coupa Catalogs, companies are able to use Coupa's software platform as a shopping and catalog management front end to their ERP-based procurement system.
In April 2014, Coupa introduced Coupa Inventory which provides all employees in an organization real-time visibility into inventory availability while they are ordering, thus reducing wasteful spending.
In October 2014, Coupa announced an update to its applications, which includes new features to optimize spend and supply chain management in the enterprise.
Starting in 2017, Coupa launched Coupa Community Intelligence. Coupa Community Intelligence allows customers on the platform to benchmark themselves to others in their industry using normalized and anonymous data pulled from the collective categorized spend running through Coupa's BSM platform.

Misappropriation of trade secrets

In May 2014, Ariba, a unit of SAP and a competitor of Coupa, filed a lawsuit alleging that Coupa misappropriated Ariba trade secrets. On September 24, 2015, the parties settled the lawsuit. Coupa acknowledged its possession of Ariba information and is required to abide by certain procedures to prevent any misappropriation in the future. Coupa paid Ariba an undisclosed amount.

Community Intelligence

The Coupa BSM platform leverages collective insights from normalized data pulled from all customers. This is anonymized data and insights that each Coupa customer is able to benchmark itself off the community and industry. Coupa provides recommendations on a transactional level. Also, Coupa is able to take the collective intelligence gathered across our entire platform—hundreds of billions of dollars of spend each year—and use that spend intelligence to continually improve our recommendations.

Acquisitions

2013:
Expenser
2015:
Trip Scanner,
Invoice Smash
2016:
Contractually
2017:
Spend360,
Trade Extensions,
Riskopy,
Deep Relevance,
Simeno
2018:
DCR Workforce

Hiperos
2019:
Exari Systems Yapta
2020:
BELLIN Group

Customers and partners

As of 2018, Coupa indicated it had 700+ customers worldwide in 40 countries and in 150 currencies, including Concentrix, Nike, Caterpillar, Slack, Coca-Cola Consolidated, Adidas, Subway, Amazon, Armstrong, Sears, Graham Packaging, BNP Paribas, TD Bank Salesforce.com, and Rent-A-Center. In 2011, Coupa started working with the Independent Purchasing Cooperative of Subway, to help its franchises in 98 countries with its cost management. Salesforce.com has its sales managers use Coupa to monitor travel expenses and sales outcomes. Rent-a-Center chose Coupa because the e-procurement product has an Amazon-like interface, which is easy for employees to use.
In October 2014, Coupa and NetSuite announced a strategic partnership to jointly market the Coupa Cloud Procurement and Expense Management SuiteApp built for NetSuite.

History

Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner founded Coupa in 2006. Stephens and Eisner previously worked at Oracle. Rob Bernshteyn took over as Coupa's CEO in February 2009, after serving as Vice President of Global Product Marketing and Management at SuccessFactors, Inc. Since then, the company has reported 26 consecutive quarters of subscription revenue growth.
In 2011, Coupa was named a Cool Vendor in Procurement and Sourcing by Gartner, which cited Coupa's solution usability. In 2014, The Forrester Wave named Coupa a market leader. Coupa was also positioned in the Leaders quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay Suites for Indirect Procurement in March 2015.
Former Yahoo CEO and PayPal president Scott Thompson joined the company's board of directors in April 2013. The company expanded globally in 2014, announcing new operations in Dublin, Ireland. Coupa's other international operations include its offices in Australia and several EMEA and Asia Pacific locations. Coupa expanded its leadership and governance in 2014 with the hiring of Tara Ryan as the company's CMO and the appointment of Roger Siboni as a new member of the company's Board of Directors.
In 2015, Coupa appointed Todd Ford as CFO. In February 2015, Coupa acquired the assets of ZenPurchase, an enterprise procurement software company. In July 2015, Coupa acquired InvoiceSmash, an e-invoicing vendor, and TripScanner, an open booking vendor. In January 2016, Coupa acquired Contractually, a cloud-based contract management solution.
In October 2016, Coupa Software went public on the Nasdaq, trading as COUP. It raised over $133 million on its first day of trading. Previously, Coupa had raised a total of $169 million in funding.