2023 Zip year In review: Expanding our footprint and exploring new horizons

As 2023 comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to reflect on what an incredible journey it’s been since our founding in 2020. 

This year alone, we've celebrated a successful Series C round of funding, hosted our inaugural user and community conference Zip Forward, introduced generative AI into our product suite, and earned countless industry recognitions and award wins—we’re very grateful. 

Let’s take a quick stroll through what we accomplished in 2023. 

Zip research: traditional procurement is broken

We kicked off the year by sharing breakthrough industry research revealing that a staggering 1-in-3 finance and accounting professionals describe their procurement process as ‘broken’.

Digging deeper, our research found that modernizing procurement processes was the favored solution to improve operational efficiency, enhance collaboration and team productivity, while also increasing spend visibility and control. We couldn’t possibly agree more.

Zip—by the numbers

This year was huge for the Zip platform. As always, our goal is to redefine the experience of procurement, empowering teams to collaborate, enhance workflows, and streamline operations so employees can grow business faster. 

Here’s how Zip did that in 2023:

Funding secured, payments unlocked

One of our most exciting announcements this year came as a double-news drop!

In May, we announced a $100 million round of Series C funding at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation, with investment from Y Combinator, CRV, and Tiger Global—followed up immediately by revealing Zip Intake-to-Pay, extending our industry-first Intake-to-Procure platform to now provide sophisticated Procure-to-Pay capabilities.

Offering end-to-end spend visibility and control, these new capabilities allow businesses to implement a holistic procurement experience, designed to be so easy that it requires zero additional training.

Then in June, we introduced Zip Vendor Cards—an advanced corporate card solution enabling rapid vendor payments, all while strengthening control and spend visibility. Built to work in tandem with our Intake-to-Procure solution, Zip Vendor Cards provide businesses a unified, highly compliant solution to automate purchase requests and approvals from initial intake to issuing payment.

All in all, Zip is now processing >$35B in cumulative spend annually—and we’re just getting started.

The AI revolution in procurement is here

In 2023, we were laser-focused on product innovation. Fresh off the heels of our new payments features, in October we launched Zip AI.

Zip AI is our new generative AI assistant built directly into the Zip product suite, designed to automate previously-manual workflows, immediately flag legal and security risks, and provide valuable and intelligent business insights every step of the way. 

Zip AI is already helping our customers accelerate their workflows—with over 521K Zip AI insights provided since launching the beta.  The future is now.

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Our first community conference: Zip Forward!

In early November, our inaugural user conference Zip Forward premiered in the heart of downtown San Francisco. Our customer and community event brought together over 400 attendees, including featured speakers from Snowflake, OpenAI, AirBnB, Discover, Figma, and more. 

Over the course of an inspired day at The Conservatory, we heard moving stories from our customers, profound keynote sessions delivered by industry leaders and experts, and shared data-driven insights directly from our team at Zip. We were also excited to unveil the latest powerful addition to our platform: Zip Sourcing!

Check out our full recap of the event for more from Zip Forward—and be sure to get on the waitlist for Zip Forward 2024!

Celebrating customer wins and powerful partnerships

At Zip, we ‘re fully aware that our success comes not only from our incredibly talented team, but also from the partners we work with, and the customers we serve.

Our 300+ customers provide us with the feedback, support, and success stories that inspire us to keep building. In 2023, we’re pleased to share that Zip has driven $2.5 billion in savings for our customers through more than 1.5 million approvals—with our customers paying out vendors in 80 countries in more than 30 different currencies. 

This year, we also introduced the Zip Global Partner Program, an international ecosystem of leading systems integrators, complementary ISVs, and premier consulting firms. With this partner program, we’re thrilled to team up with SAP to bring Zip into the SAP Store, and NetSuite, offering purpose-built integrations so companies can onboard Zip’s spend approval platform into the Netsuite instances they already use every day.

Building Our Global Procurement Community

The Zip team earned their miles this year, participating as featured guests at procurement and technology events across the globe. We went to Amsterdam for DPW, SAP Spend in Austria, Procuron in Barcelona, Procurement Foundry FORGE Engage in Atlanta, and SIG in Toronto, along with many more events here at home.

Our goal was to share the research and insights we’ve gathered while building the next generation of procurement enablement to the global stage, and demonstrate how impactful our ‘single front door’ intake platform can be for streamlining operations and increasing value at organizations.

We’re proud of our community, and can’t wait to share what we’re planning to bring to the field next year.

A year of recognition and honors

Zip is dedicated to modernizing spend controls across the entire intake-to-pay process. We’re extremely grateful for the many awards and recognitions we received in 2023, further inspiring us in our mission to redefine how employees and company leaders experience procurement.  

This year, Zip was fortunate enough to receive several accolades: 

• Forbes America’s Best Startup for Employers 2023
• Everest P2P PEAK Matrix
• ProcureTech 100, Wing VC Enterprise Tech 30
• LinkedIn’s Top Startups
• Spend Matters: ‘50 to Watch’
• Tech Ascension: Most Innovative Fintech Solution Award

Closing the books

It’s been quite a year of growth at Zip, shipping powerful new features, launching the future of AI in procurement, and building community with our inaugural Zip Forward event—and this is just the beginning.

To close out the year, we’ll turn to our CEO and co-founder Rujul Zaparde for his parting thoughts.