Vertice has made a name for itself over the years in the crowded world of expenditure management by focusing on applying AI to optimize an area where businesses are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars annually: software and cloud spend. The London-based startups business has grown 13x in the three years since its inception (similar how fast software spend has increased), and it has now raised $50 million in new funding to expand its vision.[Vertice] is designed to standardize companies processes around how they buy anything, not just software and cloud, its CEO and co-founder Roy Tuvey (pictured above, told TechCrunch. A lot of companies today have disparate solutions, different silos that they look at, and procurement teams are generally under a lot of pressure to deliver savings and efficiencies. They dont have amazing technology today. So weve brought it all together in a unified and simplified platform.Lakestar, a new investor in the company, is leading this Series C round. Perpetual Growth and CF Private Equity, as well as previous backers Bessemer Venture Partners and 83North (which co-led Vertices Series B almost exactly a year ago) are also participating.The startup has now raised around $100 million in total, and while its not disclosing valuation, Tuvey confirmed that this Series C was an up-round, valuing the company higher than the several hundred millions it was pegged at 12 months ago. The size of Vertices customers has grown, too: Its clientele now number in the hundreds across Europe, the U.S. and Asia Pacific, including the likes of chip giant ASML, Euronext, Grant Thornton, and banking behemoth Santander.For some more context, Vertices founders have a strong history of entrepreneurship: Roy and his brother Eldar previously founded two security startups, ScanSafe, which they sold to Cisco in 2009 for $200 million; and Wandera, which was acquired by Jamf for $400 million in 2021.Gartner predicts that spending on data centers in 2025 (thanks to cloud and AI), software, related IT and communication services will increase by more than 9% to just under $5 trillion, so it isnt surprising to see Vertice working in a crowded part of the enterprise market.Its competitors include a plethora of platforms that offer varying levels of services like product recommendations, pricing, side-by-side feature comparisons, and more. These include Spendbase, Spendesk, Gartner and G2.Vertices point of differentiation, Tuvey said, is how it integrates with a businesss data to better understand what to suggest. Tapping into the same approaches that a cybersecurity firm might use to better understand activity in a network, Tuvey said Vertice uses AI and other tools to build a picture of what a company does, how much it spends typically, and what it might need or want to buy next.In effect, the startup has built, along the lines of a large language model, a large software procurement model, where the parameters are not facts and insights, but software usage. The company claims it has ingested data on some $3.4 billion worth of SaaS and cloud expenditure, as well as benchmarking data on more than 16,000 software vendors (none of these have any financial relationship with Vertice, Tuvey confirmed). Customers essentially use Vertice to speed up the process of buying and also to save money. The startup says that purchasing cycles can typically be cut in half, yielding savings between 20% and 30%.We ingest all the contract information through AI, Tuvey said, adding that it uses the tech to build co-pilots to help with purchasing, automating work that finance teams might have to do manually before. We surface benchmark pricing insights and analytics that they need at the point of purchase. AI is really interesting when it comes to procurement orchestration, because you can learn where the company has bottlenecks in their processes.That, in turn, helps Vertice understand how the wider business is working, he added.For example, if a company is always spending a long time with certain steps, for example to check pricing but also security compliance, we can see how to run them in parallel and save time, he said. And you can just imagine the more and more apps you have, the AI can learn and make recommendations.Its the Tuveys background, how they are applying it to procurement, and the resulting growth that has had investors knocking on the door, said Georgia Watson, the Lakestar partner leading this round. At the moment, expenditure is top of mind for companies looking to bring down operational costs especially at startups given the constrictions they are facing around funding at the moment.Some of our portfolio companies are using Vertice, Watson said, citing the pressure to bring down software expenditure. Thats been a conversation weve been having and feedback was overwhelmingly positive, she noted, adding that Lakestar had been trying to invest previously, and finally pulled it off this time around.