Solving The Biggest Problem No One’s Ever Heard Of: Tealbook Looks To Grow 300% After Closing $14.4M Series A 

Tealbook closed a $14.4 million Series A to accelerate growth as the global pandemic has shined a new light on the supply chain and procurement industry.

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The round was led by RTP Global and also included investment from BDC Capital, Grand Ventures, Reciprocal Ventures, Refinery Ventures, S&P Global, Stand Up Ventures and Workday Ventures along with debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. Both S&P Global and Reciprocal Ventures are new investors into the company.

Tealbook’s platform gives its customers — usually large enterprises in verticals such as retail, manufacturing, health care and others —  the data needed to make procurement decisions, while using machine learning and artificial intelligence to bring transparency to the supply chain ecosystem, said founder and CEO Stephany Lapierre.

“Most Fortune 500 companies don’t understand their supply chains,” said Julius Schwerin, partner at RTP Global. “This is the biggest problem no one’s ever heard of.”

COVID-19

The pandemic brought new attention to the need for good supplier data, as well as the demand for speed and accuracy in finding the right suppliers, as the supply chain system struggled, Lapierre said.

“It definitely brought a lot of exposure to the problem,” Lapierre said.

Tealbook actually signed a deal with the U.K. government last year to help it identify more than 60,000 manufacturers of personal protective equipment, Lapierre added.

While companies like Dun & Bradstreet and Coupa Software take on the supplier issue from different technology angles, Lapierre said, Tealbook differentiates itself by the autonomous data it supplies, which helps companies make important procurement decisions.

“All the software in the world won’t solve procurement,” Schwerin said. “You can’t solve a data problem with software.”

Future growth

Tealbook anticipates growing revenue 300 percent this year and nearly doubling its employee count from 47 to 84, Lapierre said. The company now has raised $22 million in venture funding and debt.

Because of Tealbook’s data, Lapierre said she sees the company doing for buy-side procurement what ZoomInfo has been able to do for sales and marketing with their data.

“We are ahead of the market,” she said. “We see this as a huge opportunity.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.