Scanmarket Sells the Strategic Sourcing Vendor to Verdane

Scanmarket, a strategic e-sourcing provider, announced it has sold its source-to-contract (S2C) company to private equity firm Verdane.

The founders of Scanmarket, CEO Betina Nygaard and CCO Ole Nielsen, have reinvested 10% and will continue to lead development at the Denmark-based software firm, according to the announcement.

“This partnership allows us to accelerate our investments into product development and marketing, so that even more companies can benefit from the cost savings generated by our clients from adopting our platform,” Nygaard said.

Founded in 1999 by siblings Nygaard and Nielsen, Scanmarket focuses on helping medium and large companies digitalize their procurement operations.

“Procurement is still relatively undigitalized compared to for example marketing,” said Martin Welna, investment director at Verdane’s Danish office, in the announcement. “In the transition to cloud-based software for procurement professionals, efficient platforms like Scanmarket’s are key to reaping the benefits of engaging with multiple suppliers, to increase productivity and to generate cost savings. … We look forward to working together with the team at Scanmarket in realizing the company’s growth potential.”

Scanmarket has 43 employees working out of its headquarters in Solbjerg and offices in London, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Atlanta, the company website said.

Spend Matters has covered Scanmarket over the years, and lead analyst Michael Lamoureux said the company has “a lot of potential, and a track record to back it up.”

“When we did our deep dive on Spend Matters Pro (Overview, Strengths/Weaknesses, Summary Analysis), we said that ‘Scanmarket is perhaps not as well known (or shortlisted as often) as it should be for procurement organizations that truly want to drive sourcing savings tactically or on a category management basis with a vendor with a documented track record of large-scale customer success,’ and we meant it.

“It’s one of the few remaining pure-play S2C vendors with a lot of potential, and we hope that the founders can take this new investment and round out their best-in-class capabilities around the suite.”