Coupa buys Cirtuo, adds category management to its spend management suite

Coupa announced during its Inspire 2025 event that it has acquired Cirtuo, a provider of category management (CatMan) software. The move addresses a long-standing gap in many procurement technology offerings: helping teams define and manage procurement strategies, rather than just executing sourcing events.

The timing reflects the current environment. Supply disruptions, inflation, geopolitical tensions and regulatory demands are forcing companies to revisit sourcing decisions more often. In this context, CatMan has become even more critical as a way to bring structure and direction to procurement activity. And digital CatMan in itself is essential to create agility and flexibility in building and constantly adapting strategies in almost real-time and as a response to internal or external rapidly changing conditions.

What is Category Management?

Category management treats groups of products or services as ‘business units.’ It involves long-term planning, understanding internal priorities, mapping supply market trends and working closely with stakeholders. The focus is not only on savings but on making procurement decisions that are consistent, explainable and aligned with overarching company/business goals.

Strategic sourcing, by contrast, is more tactical. It is about running an RFx or finding new suppliers in response to a trigger, like a contract expiry, a supply issue or a cost-cutting initiative. 

Category management defines the conditions under which those sourcing decisions happen. One sets the direction; the other carries it out.

What is Cirtuo?

Cirtuo began as a consulting firm and launched its software platform in 2018. The product (Guided Strategy Creation™) gives procurement teams a consistent way to define category strategies, document risks and objectives, and track results. Cirtuo’s clients include large global companies such as Walmart, J&J, Boeing and PepsiCo.

For more on Cirtuo readers can refer to our 2022 Vendor Analysis (membership required), noting that since then and based on a May 2024 brief by Cirtuo, the company has grown (100 employees in 2024) and strengthened its partner and customer success functions, introduced a redesigned interface, added GenAI-based writing tools and expanded integrations with content providers like Beroe and WNS (The Smart Cube).

What does the acquisition mean for Coupa’s customers?

Coupa has long been strong in analyzing spend and running sourcing events (and more). It lacked the piece in between — a structured way to plan and build strategies. 

That’s what Cirtuo brings. It gives Coupa customers a framework to:

• Build and share category strategies
• Connect those strategies to sourcing pipelines and projects
• Track how strategies are progressing over time

This acquisition adds that missing piece to Coupa’s offering and supports Coupa’s ambition to help customers move from reacting to planning. It also helps procurement teams make the case for their work — not just in savings, but in alignment, risk reduction and business impact.

Cirtuo will continue to be sold as a standalone product. Deeper integration into Coupa’s suite will come in phases, especially for sourcing, supplier management and spend analytics.

Analyst notes

Category management software is still a niche; you can count the number of best-of-breed providers on one hand. In addition to Cirtuo, Spend Matters has also reviewed akirolabs and Positive Purchasing’s Capella. 

A key requirement for effective category management is access to both internal and external intelligence. Coupa customers already benefit from community insights and have been able to integrate market data from partners like Beroe and WNS (The Smart Cube). But until now, they could not use that data to build actual strategies in a structured way. That’s the change Cirtuo brings: a process, a set of tools and integrations to support strategy development.

This acquisition will enhance Coupa’s ‘mindshare’ in ongoing strategic procurement process automation (vs. one-off bid optimization, etc.) and with high-end forward-thinking practitioners. It is a great strategic play for knowledge modeling and knowledge representation (AI), which allows a true category modeling/management approach through robust category attributes. And it allows better market intelligence integration and plays well for community-level benchmarking beyond the more simplistic community benchmarking that Coupa has right now.

A potential roadblock comes in solution/data model integration, as Coupa has a history of loosely coupled app integration, but not a lot of deeper data model harmonization (whether via rewrite/refactor or through some type of data lake analytics). It’s a long process to see product synergies beyond commercial synergy.  

Cirtuo’s open integration model allows it to connect with both content providers and tech platforms — including sourcing suites, spend tools and supplier databases. That includes Coupa itself. Now that it’s part of Coupa, some of these integrations/partnerships, especially those with competing/overlapping platforms, may be at risk, even if the product continues to be sold independently.

Looking at Coupa’s closest competitors, other S2P suite providers are all making moves towards CatMan, signaling the importance of digital CatMan for the reasons we mentioned in our introduction. Jaggaer and GEP are the vendors with the longest-standing category management capabilities, and they continue to enhance them. SAP Ariba added a module in 2023 and continuously enhances it with new features. 

Coupa’s acquisition of Cirtuo, the leading and benchmark for best-of-breed CatMan solutions, puts it in a stronger position to compete with these players, especially for customers who are willing to elevate procurement from a tactical/operational function to a strategic one.