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Tradeshift Continues Global Momentum in First Half of 2017; Bilfinger and Société Générale Join Growing List of New Clients
[August 10, 2017]

Tradeshift Continues Global Momentum in First Half of 2017; Bilfinger and Société Générale Join Growing List of New Clients


Tradeshift, the world's largest business commerce platform, today announced continued strong growth across its business segments and broad adoption of the company's vision, platform, and apps strategy. The first half of 2017 featured a successful acquisition, major software launches, significant customer wins, new office openings, and several industry recognitions.

Industry analysts and observers are recognizing the emergence of Tradeshift as an important innovator and disruptor. Using its Platform as a Service (PaaS) architecture, the company was able to build an eProcurement solution from the ground up in record time. After just one-and-a half years in the market, Tradeshift Buy was included as a "Strong Performer" in Forrester's (News - Alert) report: The Forrester Wave™: eProcurement, Q2 2017.

"We believe that this is further validation that our approach is breaking through traditional models," said Christian Lanng, co-founder and chief executive officer, Tradeshift. "Industry analysts are taking note. Procurement leaders across the globe increasingly inquire about Tradeshift Procure-to-Pay capabilities and the extended services enabled by our open platform."

The maturing ecosystem of buyers, suppliers, partners, and apps is translating into greater strategic value for enterprise clients because it offers more choice and flexibility. In the last quarter, the average deal size has expanded by 60 percent over the average in 2015, putting Tradeshift in the league with the top five public software-as-a-service companies in the world with the greatest average contract value (ACV). The successful acquisition and ongoing integration of IBX Business Network has played a key role in accelerating Tradeshift's growth and influence as the largest business commerce platform with 1.5 million businesses and more than 500 global enterprise customers.

New Customers across Industries and Geographies

Major customer wins in the first half of the year include:

  • Bilfinger, a German-based international construction and industrial services provider
  • Global banks, such as HSBC and Société Générale
  • SGS, the world's leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland
  • Veolia, a French transnational company in water management, waste management and energy services
  • Dahua Technology, a world-leading and advanced video surveillance solution provider based in China
  • Printing and copying technology company with our partner, Quyntess
  • One of the largest chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom
  • Government-owned property services company in the U.K.
  • One of three largest consumer goods companies in the world, rolling out across more than 100 countries
  • One of the world's largest cosmetics companies
  • One of the largest airports in the world
  • Leading international network of quality, innovative institutions of higher education

"We're seeing a real diversity of eterprise customers adopting our business commerce platform to solve their business challenges," said Lanng. "There's similar diversity in the reasons why our capabilities map to customer requirements. One customer may want to leverage a set of partner applications, whereas another may want to leverage the global scope of Tradeshift network, or expand business processes to suppliers. Yet another may want to offer supply chain financing to their long tail of suppliers. In every case, our goal is to provide a flexible, powerful collection of capabilities that enable procurement to add greater value."



Pushing the Envelope for Innovation with Industry-first, In-product Artificial Intelligence

In the first quarter of the year, Tradeshift debuted Ada, an artificial intelligence (AI) layer, into the entire platform ecosystem to help businesses collaborate with each other and to make commerce faster, simpler, and smarter. The AI assistant helps users with responses to questions and requests and even makes context-based suggestions, such as apps to consider. The innovation was an industry-first and confirmed the company's leadership in AI.


"The Tradeshift platform has been continuously evolving to empower an entire ecosystem of users through a growing list of APIs and data sources that power all of our solutions," said Thijs Stalenhoef, SVP of Enterprise Products. "The AI layer is designed to tap into these APIs to deliver responses, insights and results anywhere we'd like, such as in any application on our platform and those built by third parties."

Soon after, Tradeshift announced Magellan 1. Named after the famous Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (News - Alert), the update similarly explores uncharted waters to remove barriers, collapse distances and bridge divides to increase access to commerce for every business, everywhere. The April release integrated a host of important enhancements, including the following: a redesigned collaboration functionality; new capabilities added to Tradeshift Buy, such as new, powerful, consumer-like shopping tools and an in-app chat for simplified end-user communications; a new user interface for documents; and, a wide range of invoice processing efficiencies.

Magellan 2, released on July 13, 2017, added even more to extend collaboration and choice to customers. The update included a new set of open APIs that allows for greater control of the user experience and to create category- and company-specific procurement processes for purchase requests. Users in a workflow can get real-time visibility into the status of their work items and, with Task Manager, can manage team-wide tasks, such as invoice processing. Employees can view workflow statuses within an application and across the teams. Customers can also expand internal company-marketplace offerings beyond internal catalogs to include external sites, specialized solutions, and contracts through enhanced punchout capabilities.

Tradeshift also added new functionality and services to its platform during the first half of 2017, including:

  • Integrated trade financing options through partnerships with HSBC, CreditEase, and Santander
  • New integration apps for NetSuite, QuickBooks, Shopify, Magento, Salesforce, Amazon S3, SharePoint, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox (News - Alert), as well as Actian connector for SAP, and Sage One UK Connection Manager
  • New solution and extension apps, including peer-to-peer lending with partner Biz2Credit, and access to real-time, structured, official and authoritative commercial register data from kompany

Continued Global Expansion Begets New Office Locations

The company opened new offices in Chongqing, Frankfurt, Bucharest, Oslo, Stockholm and most recently, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, an office that also includes a shared service center for supplier integrations. The Malaysian presence will expand the company's footprint to serve growing business across Asia-Pacific, and will provide "follow-the-sun" support to both buyers and suppliers. It will onboard suppliers to the platform in all languages across the region, with 15,000 projected in the next 12 months.

Entrepreneurial Recognition

Earlier this year, Tradeshift Co-Founder and CEO Christian Lanng was recognized as finalist for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2017 Award in Northern California. The awards program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. Lanng was selected as a finalist by a panel of independent judges. Now in its 31st year, the program recognizes business leaders in over 145 cities and more than 60 countries.

About Tradeshift

Founded in 2010, Tradeshift is the world's largest business commerce platform that connects buyers and sellers. Tradeshift connects over 1.5 million companies across 190 countries, processes over half a trillion USD in transaction value yearly, and has a marketplace containing 28 million SKUs. It offers solutions for procure to pay, supplier engagement and financial services, and enables companies and partners to build custom or commercial apps on its business commerce platform. Tradeshift is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Copenhagen, New York, London, Paris, Suzhou, Chongqing, Tokyo, Munich, Frankfurt, Sydney, Bucharest, Oslo, Stockholm, and Kuala Lumpur.


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