Bonfire Interactive Ltd., a Kitchener, Ontario based sourcing enablement software provider, has recently raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures with participation from Crosslink Capital and Spider Capital. Bonfire seed investors FundersClub and Garage Capital also participated in the series A financing.
Michael Brown, General Partner at Battery Ventures, has joined Bonfire board of directors.
Bonfire, a Y-Combinator graduate of the winter 2015 cohort, has raised $11 million to date, including $3 million seed round.
Bonfire — whose software platform helps 170 organizations intelligently automate more than $12 billion of annual procurement decisions like requests for proposals (RFPs), bids, tenders, and reverse auctions — plans to use the financing to expand its sales and marketing teams, while also escalating product development in key areas like predictive analytics.
“Over the last 10 years, companies like Concur, Gusto and BlackLine have modernized basic corporate processes such as expense management, HR and benefits administration, and financial reporting,” said Brown. “So in 2017 it seems crazy that hundreds of billions — if not trillions — of dollars of procurement decisions are still being made offline, without the benefits of online collaboration and analysis. Excel is still the primary workhorse of sourcing decision-making.”
Bonfire’s broad client base — which includes public sector institutions and organizations in highly-regulated industries such as healthcare, natural resources and financial services — uses the platform to handle a wide range of procurement projects. The flexible platform can be used for simple, low-dollar-value procurement decisions all the way up to highly-complex, multi-stage, hundred-million-dollar RFPs that require hundreds of stakeholders to collaboratively review thousands of pages of requirements and criteria.
Bonfire clients include: global accounting firm BDO; Chicago Board of Education, the third largest school board in the US; Ivy Tech Community College, the largest community college system in the US; the city of Louisville, Kentucky; Canada’s national healthcare group purchasing organization Medbuy; Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the transit planning, financing and coordinating agency for the San Francisco Bay Area; and The University of Massachusetts university system. The Bonfire vendor community includes thousands of suppliers — including the majority of the Fortune 1000.
“Bonfire’s ability to simplify and automate high-complexity, high-consequence procurement decisions distinguishes the platform from basic ‘next-generation’ RFP tools and legacy bidding portals,” said Ian Brennan, senior manager of procurement at global accounting firm BDO. “Bonfire stands alone in terms of meeting our needs and our clients’ needs.”
“We are seeing a fundamental shift in how procurement teams approach sourcing,” said Corry Flatt, Bonfire CEO and co-founder. “Procurement teams used to work in isolation, focused on largely tactical outcomes like incremental cost savings or basic compliance. But today’s procurement leaders have a new imperative: to drive transformative, strategic change. They’re searching for ways to make their sourcing process smarter, faster, more collaborative and data-driven — and that’s where Bonfire wins.”
“We are delighted to have Michael and the Battery team join us. Battery’s partners have a deep understanding of our vision and we look forward to partnering with them as we scale,” added Flatt.
photo credit: Bonfire