PayShepherd Raises $7 Million for Vendor Management Platform

PayShepherd has raised $7 million in a seed funding round for its vendor relationship management platform designed for heavy industry firms.

“This new funding will accelerate the execution of our mission: protecting mission-critical relationships between industrial operators and their vendors and enabling our clients to focus on what they do best: creating outstanding products that are used every day, both at work and in our personal lives,” the company said in a Wednesday (March 6) post on LinkedIn.

The PayShepherd platform is designed to help industrial operators better manage their contractor relationships, eliminating what is often a paper-heavy process, according to the company’s website.

It automates contract compliance, centralizing, digitizing and verifying all submissions on labor, equipment and materials, the website said. It provides full control of spend, contract compliance, real-time visibility into incurred costs, predictive budget monitoring and enhanced vendor relationships.

PayShepherd’s funding round was led by Inovia Capital , according to the post.

“Heavy industry facing increased compliance requirements and shrinking profit margins while managing large contracted workforces relies on outdated processes for vendor management,” Inovia said in a Wednesday post on its website. “Its digital transformation lag presents an opportunity to improve transparency and accountability and streamline workflows.”

By providing transparency, control and compliance over contracted workforces, PayShepherd’s vendor relationship management solution helps heavy industry firms prevent overspending, safety risks and legal issues that can undermine relationships with vendors and contractors, the post said.

The post highlighted PayShepherd’s “innovative technology and unwavering commitment to understanding customer pain points.”

“Inovia’s investment in PayShepherd aligns with our commitment to backing category-leading companies in high-growth verticals,” the company said in the post.

In an earlier development in this space, Vic.ai said in August that it added Vic.ai Payments to its artificial intelligence (AI) autonomous finance platform to help accounts payable (AP) teams streamline the payment process and change how businesses handle their invoices .

In May, BlueCart added a new vendor bill pay solution to its wholesale order management platform, saying the new BlueCart Pay would enable wholesale and distribution businesses to pay vendors for transactions that were made outside the BlueCart platform.

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