Cotiss pivots to commercial intelligence for finance leaders

Cotiss has shifted from procurement software to a commercial intelligence platform for finance leaders at large enterprises, following what the New Zealand company describes as a full business transformation.

Founded in 2020, Cotiss began as a source-to-contract software provider for procurement teams. It has served customers in New Zealand, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, with visibility over $80.4 billion in third-party spend.

It is now repositioning around a broader problem inside large organisations: vendor and contract information is often scattered across emails, contracts, meetings and internal files rather than held in a single enterprise system. Cotiss argues that this fragmentation leaves finance and operations teams with an incomplete view of supplier commitments and emerging costs.

The new approach focuses on reading records a business already produces, rather than requiring employees to enter data into another system. Email is the primary source, accessed through Microsoft's Graph API, and the platform also connects with more than 200 tools, including contract repositories, ERP platforms and finance systems.

Matthew Whiting, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cotiss, said the company concluded that its earlier product addressed the effects of the problem rather than its source.

"Our original product worked well and procurement teams found real savings with it," Whiting said.

"But those savings couldn't scale across the business, because no procurement system can fix vendor data so fragmented that it sits in someone's inbox, in three different spreadsheets, in a contract folder, in the ERP, and in an employee's head."

He said that realisation pushed the company further upstream, into the creation and flow of commercial information.

"We had to go upstream, to where that information actually gets created. We believe it's the only way you can truly solve the problem. The old approach - 'If people filled in the system properly, we'd be fine' - hasn't worked for three decades. Betting on people finally filling in the boxes is doomed. They never will," Whiting said.

Why the shift

Cotiss said the change became practical only when the cost of applying language models to large volumes of documents fell enough to make enterprise-wide analysis feasible. That opened the way to examine supplier relationships at scale through their underlying records.

The company argues that important commercial developments often appear first in an inbox rather than in formal systems. These can include notices of price rises, revised delivery commitments, side agreements, duplicate suppliers across divisions, unclaimed rebates and contracts that renew automatically.

Whiting described email as the earliest signal of commercial change.

"The inbox is where the commercial reality shows up first," Whiting said.

"The price-increase notice, the side agreement, the supplier telling you they cannot hit the date. That information lands in email weeks or months before it becomes a number in the ERP - if it ever does. Most tools in this market read what has already been filed in a contract system or summarised into the ERP, and by then the context has been stripped out. We read the original."

The company is making its case at a time when contract value leakage remains a significant concern for large organisations. Cotiss cited research by World Commerce & Contracting that found organisations lose an average of 11% of contract value after signature, with losses linked to unchallenged price increases, duplicate supplier arrangements, missed rebates and renewals that pass without intervention.

Finance focus

The shift also marks a change in target buyer. Cotiss is now focusing on finance leaders rather than procurement teams, arguing that supplier agreements should be treated as financial assets with direct implications for margins and cost control.

Most of Cotiss's existing customers have already moved to the commercial intelligence platform, according to the company. The business remains headquartered in Auckland, while expansion efforts are focused on the United States from its San Francisco office.

It is targeting large organisations in banking, logistics, infrastructure, energy and government, where supplier networks are often extensive, and contract terms can be spread across many systems and teams.

Whiting said this fragmented picture leaves material sums exposed.

"Most large organisations have millions of dollars tied up in supplier spend and very little visibility into where the savings or the risk actually sit," Whiting said.

"A contract is a financial asset but most companies file it like paperwork. Cotiss gives finance leaders a way to protect margin through the commercial relationships they already have, rather than another cost-cutting programme or another round of headcount reductions."