LevaData Kicks Off Second Annual Cognitive Sourcing Summit

Spend Matters is on the ground in Santa Clara, California, today for the 2018 Cognitive Sourcing Summit. Hosted by LevaData, an emerging provider of e-sourcing software, the event, now in its second year, brings together leading procurement professionals to examine trends in strategic sourcing, with an emphasis on how artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing the way organizations approach this foundational process.

All day Thursday, LevaData is hosting a veritable “who’s who” in procurement and enterprise software, with keynote speech and panelists including Ray Wang, principal and founder at Constellation; Kevin Purser, head of global supply chain sourcing and procurement at Fitbit; Angel Mendez, COO at Here Technologies; and Tania Seary, founder of Procurious.

While LevaData plans to expand upon several of the themes it first explored at its inaugural Congnitive Sourcing Summit, in October 2017, we will also be looking to hear about the latest updates to the vendor’s platform, as well as the results of some relevant research about procurement’s readiness to effectively use AI-powered technology.

In the year since its last event, LevaData has made several notable strides toward its goal of pushing “cognitive” sourcing software into the procurement mainstream. The first of these came at the 2017 summit, where the vendor introduced Leva, an AI-based advisor for strategic sourcing and procurement. Leva’s key features include always-on sensing of sourcing risks or opportunities and a Negotiation Playbook, which recommends different negotiation tactics to use in the appropriate context and sequence with a given supplier.

Beyond the Leva release, LevaData also scored a couple of notable wins in first half of 2018. In June, the vendor announced it had raised $12 million in a Series B funding round led by Tola Capital. The most recent cash infusion brought LevaData’s total venture capital funding since 2014 to $20 million, which the company plans to invest in further platform enhancements and expansion into new industry verticals beyond electronics.

And in May, LevaData joined the group of select procurement software providers that make up the Spend Matters 50 Providers to Know list, which shines a light on relative technology newcomers that are pushing procurement forward. These are the companies offering the latest and most innovative solutions in the industry.

Stay tuned to Spend Matters Thursday and in the coming days for coverage of the “cognitive sourcing” landscape, and in the meantime, be sure to check out our deep dive Vendor Snapshot on LevaData to better understand what the vendor is all about:

Forging a Cognitive Future for Procurement: LevaData Kicks Off Second Annual Cognitive Sourcing Summit