Raindrop
Unifying Procurement Business Processes

No matter their size, every company deals with managing how and where they spend their money. Simply put, “what is our company getting for the money we’re spending?”, is the entire issue trying to be solved. This is the key question Ward Karson, co-founder of Raindrop, a Santa Clara, California-based enterprise spend management company seeks to solve every day for their customers. What Karson and his co-founder business partner realized, most companies generally have a half-dozen or more different spend management technologies in their environment, and unfortunately are not usually well integrated, capable of talking to each other, are expensive, require numerous internal and external resources to maintain, and require downtime to upgrade.

So, while at a high level, spend management sounds like a fairly simple process, we can rapidly see the complexities companies face trying to answer “how are we spending our money?”. We began trying to answer that question by understanding how money flows out of any company. It all starts with budget planning for your needs. When the budget is agreed upon, the next step is to go out to market and source the respective good and/or service your company needs. After price, product, quality, and other terms are accepted, the customer signs a contract, cuts a Purchase Order, pays the invoice, and prepares to renew their purchase if and when it’s planned for. Unfortunately, the reality of keeping this seemingly simple process all in one cohesive place is far more complex than it sounds.

Enter Raindrop and their spend management technology. Karson has worked as a Procurement industry executive for the past 30 years, and is a Procurement industry subject matter expert. What Karson and his Raindrop co-founders realized is, all of the major existing technology solutions out there are built on “heavy” 20 to 30 year old architecture, frequently cobbled together through acquisitions, often not well integrated, can cost a fortune to license and maintain, and require months or even years to fully implement for their customers. What became clear to Karson was, if anyone knows about how to digitize the required process of managing the outflow of company spend, it’s experienced Procurement industry people like us who actually do it for a living. That’s when Raindrop was born.

Built from the outset as a secure and seamlessly integrated modular platform SaaS solution with Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and blockchain technologies, Raindrop is clearly an industry-disrupter about to shake up the landscape. Because Raindrop only requires an internet browser to access, its ‘lightweight’ footprint is already a difference maker.

As we found out, and are now true believers, with Raindrop’s instant value-attainment and capabilities, Raindrop is the industry-disruptive spend management technology customers have been waiting for

Customers can go to www.raindrop.com to get a completely free production instance – an immediately available and perfect solution for SMB companies to manage their external spend, or for enterprise-sized companies to instantly use and measure against their existing older and expensive solutions. Built for ease of use with a highly flexible interface which flies in the face of historically rigid existing industry software solutions, Raindrop’s slogan of “do your business your way” makes perfect sense. And with a built-in collaboration feature (for example, when running a reverse auction in Raindrop’s Sourcing module), your company employees can do all of their work and communication all without needing to leave the Raindrop platform. With so many advantages, we were left wondering why a company would want anything else.

During the COVID-19 pandemic times, Raindrop helped a number of clients ensure business continuity by empowering them with the critical information and seamless communication channels which drove cost-efficiency across their organizations. At the same time, Karson told us Raindrop’s API library integrates with popular ERP, SSO, HRIS and other enterprise software technologies if that’s what the customer wants. As Karson said, Raindrop delivers the most frictionless user experience for procurers across all market sectors, across all geographies. Moving forward, Raindrop aims to enhance its footprint in the Procurement market and highlight its value to additional investors, which will help the company further strengthen their capabilities and competencies of its solution. As we found out, and are now true believers, with Raindrop’s instant value-attainment and capabilities, Raindrop is the industry-disruptive spend management technology customers have been waiting for.