From Early Conviction to Category Leader: Pactum’s Agentic AI for Procurement

As Pactum announces its latest funding round, we reflect on the vision that has guided them from the beginning.

At Project A, we’ve always believed that some of the most valuable companies of the next decade will emerge from deep inside the enterprise. Often, it starts in the workflows no one wants to touch.

Procurement is one of them. It’s the quiet engine room of the global economy. Behind every product and service, there’s a chain of suppliers, contracts, approvals, and negotiations. Most of it is still managed through spreadsheets, inboxes, and manual effort. For decades, that system remained largely unchanged: slow, opaque, and expensive.

In early 2020, before autonomous agents entered the mainstream conversation, we met a small team in Estonia who had already started building them. Their idea wasn’t to digitise procurement. It was to rethink it entirely. Not with dashboards or assistants, but with AI systems that could take on the work directly.

That team was Pactum.

This week, they announced a $54 million Series C, led by Insight Partners. It’s an important milestone for the company and a moment to reflect on the vision that’s guided them from the beginning.

Procurement Was Ready

Procurement teams today face increasing demands. Budgets are tighter, supply chains more complex, and expectations around efficiency continue to grow. Yet many organisations still rely on manual workflows, fragmented data, and reactive decision-making.

Pactum saw this as an opportunity to build something fundamentally different.

Their platform focuses on a combination of full autonomy and amplification. It identifies commercial opportunities, engages with suppliers, negotiates terms, and feeds results back into enterprise systems. All of this happens according to the company’s own rules and data sources.

Pactum’s agents now handle routine negotiations that previously consumed weeks of human effort, operate across supplier networks at unprecedented scale, and deliver consistent outcomes based on organisational priorities. One deal was fully negotiated and signed in just 87 seconds. This allows procurement professionals to shift their focus to strategic partnerships, complex negotiations requiring business judgment and supplier relationship management.

Why We Backed Them Early

We were drawn to Pactum not just because the problem was large, but because it was structured.

Procurement is governed by policies, pricing frameworks, approval chains, and compliance requirements. It’s a domain where AI doesn’t just make sense – it can actually outperform traditional approaches, especially at scale. Pactum started with exactly the right use case: long-tail negotiations that procurement teams don’t have time to pursue but that collectively represent real value.

Over time, they extended their platform to support direct materials, post-sourcing processes, contract renewals, and pricing updates. As companies gained confidence in the agents, Pactum expanded its footprint within their organisations. That journey – from supporting tactical work to enabling strategic value – is what we believed would define the most enduring AI platforms.

A Company Built for the Long Term

Pactum’s impact goes beyond automation. They’re helping companies scale supplier engagement, standardise terms, improve compliance, and reduce procurement overhead. Their agents operate continuously, handling volumes that human teams simply couldn’t manage.

Just as important has been the way the company has approached scale. They’ve built integrations into key procurement systems like SAP Ariba and Coupa. They’ve brought in talent from across the procurement ecosystem and worked closely with enterprise procurement teams to ensure the agents can be embedded into real-world decision flows and governance models.

This is not just a productivity layer on top of procurement. It’s an example of how a function can be rethought from first principles when software is no longer just a tool, but a participant in the process.

And it’s working. Over 50 large enterprises now use Pactum, including Walmart, Novartis, Honeywell, BMW, Tetra Pak, Johnson & Johnson, and Rolls-Royce. Pactum’s AI agents are already delivering savings autonomously and at scale – one deal was fully negotiated and signed in just 87 seconds.

Part of a Broader Thesis

Our investment in Pactum is part of a broader deep-dive into global supply chains. We believe that over the next decade, many of the most important enterprise software companies will be built around the digitisation and automation of foundational supply chain functions. Procurement is one of the most strategic – and least transformed – of those functions.

From day one, Pactum stood out to us as a team not only building in this space, but helping define what a new category could look like.

The Path Forward

With this new round, Pactum is positioned to continue scaling its platform across a growing base of global enterprise customers. The company is also deepening its agent capabilities, evolving from negotiation execution toward upstream opportunity identification and end-to-end orchestration.

But what stands out the most is how steady they’ve been. In a time when AI excitement can often outpace real-world delivery, Pactum has stayed grounded in product depth, enterprise readiness, and measurable outcomes.

We’ve been fortunate to partner with them since the early days, when their vision felt contrarian. Today, it feels obvious. And they’ve helped make that shift happen.

Congratulations to Kaspar, Kristjan, and the entire Pactum team.

Your progress has been inspiring to watch, and we look forward to what’s ahead.