SUSTAINABILITY
With over 60 institutional investors attending DPW looking to fund the next unicorn, the event is more than a conference; it is building an ecosystem beyond the practitioner and the vendor.
“ Procurement has always lagged a little behind other functions like sales and marketing in terms of investment. But I feel now it’ s procurement time. Pivot just raised US $ 40m, Terzo just raised US $ 40m. There’ s big money coming into procurement, and that’ s exciting,” says Matthias.
The future of procurement conferences Matthias has spent two decades in the procurement industry, working with leaders to launch events. Once he became head of marketing for a procuretech startup he realised there were no events in procurement that made it easy and affordable for startups to get involved with a limited budget.
“ There were no investors, and there was no event really focusing on tech and digital,” he says.
“ If you look at some of these events even today, they’ re based on a simple business model, the vendor on one side, the practitioner on the other. But there’ s an entire ecosystem around those two personas: young talent, researchers, investors, even the business. I wanted to build this end-to-end ecosystem, and that didn’ t exist back then.”
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