Vndly Closes $11 Million Series A Funding Round: A VMS Category Buster in the Making?

Vndly, which describes itself as a “cloud-based work management system (WMS) to power the new gig economy,” announced Thursday that it has closed an $11 million Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures and Hyde Park Ventures. According to the announcement, the “investment will be used to drive product innovation, customer adoption and global expansion.”

Vndly describes itself as a software-as-a-service WMS system, which “unlike legacy VMS offerings … uses an ‘outcomes’-based management approach rather than a traditional ‘process’-based approach, along with machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms to automate manual tasks.” The announcement also states that the Vndly platform has four major modules: contingent workforce management, statement of work (SOW) management, independent contractor (IC) compliance and total talent acquisition.

When Cincinnati-based Vndly entered the contingent workforce/services (CW/S) solution space, launching with beta clients in mid-2017, it came out swinging.

Co-founder and CEO Shashank Saxena has been clear about the intent to reframe the problem and the solution of businesses managing the non-employee/contingent workforce at the end of the second decade of the 21th century. In the announcement, Saxena said, “We founded Vndly ... to address a rapidly growing problem fueled by the rise of contractors, freelancers and the gig economy” and “we are poised to transform the legacy VMS market with our WMS platform.”

Spend Matters has spent over a dozen hours reviewing and demoing the Vndly solution in recent quarters and validating its RFI responses as part of Spend Matters SolutionMap. We have also created a summary research brief exploring where it excels on a comparative basis compared to peers.

In this Spend Matters PRO briefing, rather than focus on the specifics of the funding event, we instead examine Vndly’s approach to addressing current and emerging requirements (of organizations, suppliers, intermediaries and workers) for CW/S enterprise technology solutions. In addition, we place Vndly in the broader context of a once well-defined, VMS-centric CW/S technology solution industry in which the solution provider landscape has been evolving and the boundaries of solution categories have been changing over the last five years.