Most SaaS founders in 2015 were chasing the "Uber for X" gold rush. Andrew Zhyvolovych was solving a decidedly unsexy problem: why do companies have zero visibility into their spending?
"I realized the people who control spending often have the least visibility into it," says Andrew, founder and CEO of Precoro. "That's not a technology problem—it's a systems architecture problem."
Nearly a decade later, his procurement platform manages over $40 billion in annual corporate spending for 1,000+ customers across 80 countries—competing head-to-head with legacy players like Coupa, SAP Ariba, and Zip, but with a fundamentally different approach.
The Technical Bet: Centralization First, Features Second
When Andrew started building Precoro, the procurement software market was dominated by enterprise vendors selling feature-rich, complex systems that took 12–18 months to implement. He made a contrarian bet: most companies didn't need more features. They needed their data in one place.
"If your procurement is decentralized—scattered across email, Excel, and different departments—you're essentially running multiple disconnected systems," Andrew explains. "You can't get volume discounts. You can't spot duplicate subscriptions. Every dollar you waste is a dollar you can't invest in growth."
The technical challenge was building a platform lightweight enough for fast deployment (2–8 weeks vs. the industry standard of 12+ months) but robust enough to handle multi-entity organizations with complex approval workflows.
Andrew's solution: a single-tenant SaaS architecture with no-code configuration for approval chains, budget hierarchies, and role-based access. The result is a system that finance teams can deploy without IT involvement—a critical advantage when competing against enterprise vendors that require dedicated implementation teams.
The Data Foundation Problem
One reason Precoro can move fast: they made early technical decisions that paid off years later. In 2017, Andrew integrated Google's OCR technology for invoice processing—a move that seemed like table stakes at the time but became crucial as the company layered on more sophisticated capabilities.
"Everyone talks about AI in procurement now," Andrew says. "But AI only works if your data foundation is solid. If procurement data is scattered across systems, AI can't find patterns or surface insights. We built centralization first, which made everything else possible."
Today, Precoro's platform uses machine learning to match invoices to purchase orders, flag duplicate payments, and surface spending anomalies. Earlier this year, they launched an AI assistant that answers natural language queries about spending patterns—a feature that relies entirely on having clean, structured data.
According to The Hackett Group, better data visibility is one of the key drivers of procurement ROI. But visibility is just the starting point. The real value comes from turning that data into action: preventing duplicate orders before they're placed, alerting teams when budgets approach limits, and identifying rogue spending in real time.
Competing Against Enterprise Giants
Precoro's competition includes well-funded enterprise players with sales teams, massive marketing budgets, and decades of market presence. Andrew's advantage? Speed and focus.
"Enterprise vendors sell on features. We sell on outcomes," he says. "A customer can go live with Precoro in weeks, not months. They don't need consultants or IT resources. And because we're focused on mid-market companies with 50–1,000 employees, we built workflows that actually match how they operate."
The numbers back up the approach. Customers report measurable results: a 7x faster month-end close for a fintech startup, a 30-to-zero reduction in purchase document errors for a logistics company, and centralized procurement across 50+ branches for a Kenyan bank.
The Customer-Funded Growth Model
Unlike most SaaS companies, Andrew built Precoro without venture capital. It's a decision that shaped everything about the company's technical roadmap.
"We had to build features customers would actually pay for, not features that looked good in investor decks," Andrew says. "That forced us to stay disciplined. Every dollar we made went back into the product."
That discipline extends to hiring. Andrew prioritizes promoting internal talent over external executive hires—a philosophy that's helped the company maintain product velocity as it scales.
Precoro also achieved B Corp certification and set a carbon neutrality goal for 2026, unusual commitments for a SaaS company optimizing for growth.
What's Next: The Procurement OS
Andrew's vision for Precoro is to become the operating system for procurement—a central hub where all purchasing activity flows through, regardless of where it originates.
"Right now, companies use different tools for different parts of procurement," he says. "We're building toward a world where everything—intake, approvals, orders, invoices, supplier management—lives in one system. That's when procurement becomes truly predictable."
The technical challenge isn't just building features. It's maintaining speed and simplicity while adding sophistication—the classic SaaS balancing act.
For companies navigating tighter budgets and economic uncertainty, the ability to prevent wasteful spending in real time is becoming a competitive advantage. According to KPMG, companies with mature procurement operations can reduce costs by up to 47% while improving productivity by 54%.
The difference isn't better suppliers or harder negotiation. It's having systems that give leaders visibility and control before problems compound.
"The best procurement teams aren't reacting to problems," Andrew says. "They're preventing them. That requires the right technical foundation—which most companies are still building."
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