Spend Matters Future 5 2023 – Why we chose dSilo

Spend Matters is delighted to announce the 2023 roster for our ‘Future 5‘ list. For the fifth year in a row, our analysts have highlighted five start-ups that excited them the most. This year, the five companies that have proven themselves as potential future trend setters are akirolabs, Calculum, dSilo, Mithra and ORO Labs.

To warrant such attention, these vendors must have a product that is ideally 2 to 5 years old, has more than five customers and displays an innovative application of technology. Moreover, these vendors must have less than $10 million in revenue, and our analysts must find them both sustainable and growing with a clear momentum. In this series of articles, we explain what these vendors offer, why they are likely to become future members of our ‘50 Procurement Providers to Watch‘ and ‘50 Procurement Providers to Know‘ lists and what challenges they may face.

Recently our analysts hosted a webinar to explain their selection process and what makes a provider stand out. If you missed it you can …

In no order of preference, today we are sharing the reasoning behind our selection of dSilo.

What it does

dSilo is an AI-focused contract and invoicing analytics solution that helps companies derive value from existing data through pre-trained AI models.

dSilo’s founders are people with extensive supply chain and enterprise technology experience who identified a gap in the solution market: valuable information exists within unstructured procurement data, but it is rarely ever extracted and made useful. dSilo addresses this by offering an accessible (to a broad range of end users), no-code solution that offers actionable insights from contract and invoice documents.

Why we chose it

dSilo is taking an innovative approach to what is traditionally understood as contract or invoice analytics. Its deep AI capabilities make it more of a spend-analytics-adjacent solution, but with contracts as a primary data source. This is a more advanced use case than standard contract analytics, which typically do not incorporate as much data from other procurement processes with granular, clause-level insights. And given the solution’s no-code base, it can be easily tailored to a company’s specific needs.

Despite its relative youth, dSilo continues to innovate, such as through its proprietary, procurement-specific LLM and generative AI product (ProcureGPT), which allows for quicker insight gathering, automated supplier messaging, workflow assistance and more.

dSilo is an impressive solution as is, but it is also easy to see it as a provider at the forefront of a budding category in the S2P software market. The solution bridges siloed modules and teams in an inventive way, and it could lead to an influx of providers that use AI to deliver spend analytics-level insights, but with a contracts-specific lens.

Any threats or challenges ahead?

dSilo is a provider that is tackling a common problem, but in a new way — this can always lead to more difficult roads to market adoption and for the purpose of the solution to resonate with potential customers. The company’s founders have purposely taken a conservative marketing approach so far (through not spending money on lead generation or marketing), but once customer growth becomes a priority, the framing of the solution’s approach to finding value from existing, unstructured data will be crucial.

It makes sense to classify dSilo as a no-code, AI-based contract analytics platform, but the label simultaneously feels reductive given its invoice capture, granular insights, generative AI capabilities, etc. However, the fact that the solution addresses a very real problem is undeniable; now, dSilo will need to consider the above challenges while continuing to differentiate itself from other vendors that are beginning to emerge with similar use cases.

Read our feature interview with dSilo here.

Look out for more featured coverage of the Spend Matters Future 5 next week.

Get to know all the procurement tech providers that made our lists this year and the methodology behind the selection criteria: 

Reach out if you would like to know more about becoming a Future 5.

If you are thinking about buying procurement technology, try consulting Spend Matters TechMatch for a rapid shortlist.