Spend Matters Future 5 2024: Why we chose Halo Ai

Spend Matters is delighted to announce the 2024 roster for our ‘Future 5’ list. For the sixth 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 BlueBean, ivoflow, Covalyze, Halo Ai and True ValueHub.

To warrant such attention, these vendors must have a product that is ideally 2 to 5 years old, is used by 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.

Get to know all the procurement tech providers that made our lists this year.

Today, we’re introducing another of our Future 5s: Halo Ai.

What is Halo Ai

HaloAi is a third-party risk management (TPRM) solution that aims to be a one-stop shop for third-party risk so that organizations do not need multiple point solutions.

Halo Ai uses AI models to connect, correlate and contextualize real-time data points to bring customers the full risk story. Even though it is a young company, through partnerships, it has financial and cyber data on millions of companies already in its system. Halo Ai builds its supplier risk profiles via third-party data providers and web-sweeping techniques; it does not allow for supplier self-reporting without using external sources for validation. The customer’s supply chain is mapped through cyber pings/IP addresses and third-party data providers with which they can see how tier-1 suppliers connect to other places and therefore find any available tier-n suppliers.

Why we chose Halo Ai

We numbered Halo Ai among the Future 5 for 2024 because it is a vendor with impressive potential in the ever-growing field of third-party risk management. While it is young, the tool already supports a dozen types of risk management and has automatic compliance for sixteen information security, privacy and other standards.

Halo Ai is built for an end user in one of the following teams: procurement, third-party risk management, vendor management, enterprise risk management, compliance, security, information security, environmental social governance (ESG), corporate social responsibility (CSR), diversity, climate and legal. Its customers are in the Financial Services, FinTechs, Insurance, Investment Firms (PE/VC), Education and Technology industries.

The product is already able to support financial, cyber, geopolitical and economic risk management today, alongside various ESG metrics. The interface is designed to be supplier profile specific, so each supplier has its own dashboard that shows detailed risk data, although an overall dashboard is available to each client as well.

Halo Ai’s value proposition of covering all types of risk is strong, and the founding team has managed to make strides in a short period. The platform itself has a friendly UX and offers insights in a digestible format. Overall, it aggregates a plethora of information into one, simple-to-use platform.

Threats or challenges ahead

It is important to remember that Halo Ai is a very young, small team. Its product launched in 2023, it has less than 10 employees, and its funding is pre-seed; while its product is intriguing, it remains to be seen whether the solution itself will succeed long-term.

From a more technical point of view, Halo Ai currently lacks strategic tools. For example, the tool currently lacks overall action plans or recommendations for a user’s supply chain; it is on the user to aggregate the information on their dashboard into a plan (although it is worth noting that supplier-specific improvement steps are available for financial, cyber and compliance metrics).

Other key capabilities are on the roadmap but not yet live. For example, there is no supplier portal for advanced collaboration, and custom KPIs or reports are not yet available.

These missing features could challenge the vendor going forward, as the TPRM market is vast and has many well-established players. While new entrants are constantly popping up, well-developed platforms include those such as Prevalent and Exiger, which may make it difficult for Halo Ai to gain a significant market share in the US (where it is based).

While we are optimistic about Halo Ai’s value proposition and future, it is important for Halo Ai to find a way to distinguish itself from its competitors and the market holistically.

Read our interview: An Introduction to Halo Ai to discover its distinguishing features.