Anaconda transforms procurement to a strategic function with Zip

The challenge

Like many fast-growing startups, Anaconda didn’t have a formal procurement process in place. "I always describe it as the wild west," says Noah Franz, Director of Strategic Finance at Anaconda. "As a startup, you have immature processes. You have to professionalize the business as you go."

Without a defined procurement function or platform, stakeholders across the business directly contracted with vendors whenever there was a need for a new tool and service. While this approach worked initially, it introduced significant risks as the company grew. This included financial risk from rogue spend, IT risk from unapproved software, and legal risk from contracts signed without proper reviews in place.

In their initial audits, the company discovered instances of over-provisioning, oftentimes buying more seats than needed . "Purchasers were doing their best to estimate the size of the company and how many seats we would actually need, but they weren't really trying to negotiate that as much as possible," Noah shares. Without finance visibility on the intake side, these oversights went unchecked.

The solution

Anaconda implemented Zip as their procurement platform specifically for its integration capabilities with their existing tech stack, particularly Ironclad, their legal contracting software. "The attraction in Zip is that it allows our legal team, with a direct integration, to live entirely in Ironclad," says Noah. "They don't have to run between two different systems."

Today, every Anaconda employee has access to Zip to submit procurement requests. The approval workflow runs in parallel across IT, security, legal, and finance, reducing cycle times while maintaining proper controls. Once all approvals are complete, the request automatically flows to Ironclad, where the Chief Legal Officer receives notification that everything has been vetted and is ready for signature, a gate that didn’t exist before Zip.

Beyond intake, Zip serves as a knowledge management platform for vendor spend. "It's basically been a place that replaced a big spreadsheet we maintained with every single vendor listed and the dollars and the start and stop dates," Noah shares. The platform also integrates with NetSuite for accounting and with Anaconda's FP&A tool, Aleph, enabling seamless data flow across systems.

The result

With Zip as their procurement orchestration tool, Anaconda has a new level of spend visibility and control across the organization. Department heads and budget owners have clear insight into the software in their stack, along with spend they control and transactions are happening in their domain. "Pretty much no requester at our company is able to request something without the department head approving it," says Noah. "That's helped control vendor sprawl, rogue spend, and redundancies in our software stack."

The platform's intuitive design has made it easy to adopt across the company with minimal training required. "Zip is intuitive enough for requesters that they don't even need that much training. You just follow the prompts along," adds Noah.

With their current SLA at 21 days, Anaconda is targeting 15 days for complex requests in 2026, powered by Zip's conditional workflow capabilities that eliminate unnecessary approval steps based on request type. Looking ahead, Noah sees Zip as essential to his goal of making procurement a more strategic function at the company. "I don't think I would be able to do that without Zip right now. Just by instituting a reliable system that works and functions as a source of truth that I can go back to and validate and verify."

His advice for companies at a similar growth stage? "Get Zip as early as possible. It's so self-service and easy to use that even if it's an FP&A team of one, I think you could get Zip working very easily without being a huge draw on that person's time. And then as the organization grows, Zip will already be in place, and you can configure it along the way."