Spend Culture Conversations with Vikas Kante, Head of Finance at Mitra Chem

Speaker A: Hello, everybody. Welcome into the room. Today we are just going to give everybody a moment to come in the door. So hang tight, grab a coffee, uh, do whatever you need to do just for a moment before we kick off today. Okay? Nice to see some folks flooding in. This is great. You got our Spend Culture community showing up this morning, this afternoon, wherever you are. Okay? M. We are going to kick it off. So good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are dialing in with us today or if you're listening to this recording later on. Thank you for tuning into us. Welcome to Spend Culture. So Spend Culture is a series where we chat with incredible finance leaders about the trends in the market, the challenges they're facing, how they're solving for those, and any valuable lessons that they've learned along the way, really from managing finance at the world's best organization. So, super exciting series and I'm delighted to be your host today. I am Bron o', Connor, VP of Marketing here at Procurify. Before we get into today's conversation, a few housekeeping notes. So the recording will be shared following this session or you can choose to listen to this session on Spotify, Apple, wherever you like to get your podcasts. So we really like to make content that uh, is dynamic and can meet you where you are. So you'll have many options of whether you want to read the transcript later, listen to it in podcast style, or as you said, you can fit you into your day to day and you'll join us live. So thank you for that. Um, but because of all of that, we are deck free. So we're really about bringing the conversation to you in multiple formats and we will share some helpful reading for you after the fact as well be linking it into our on demand, uh, sections. We'll also be sending it out by email so you'll have lots of content to read up on the various topics that we chat about today. And for those of you joining today's webinar, our chat will be monitored by the wonderful Amanda. So please jump in there, say hi to Amanda, introduce yourself and share your perspectives as we go through today's conversation. Spend Culture is of course about the wonderful guests that we have, but also about the community that we're creating. So we want to see that fusion happen. All right, well, let's get into it. Today's guest on um, Spend Culture is Vicus Kante. Vikas is a high growth startup CFO in the energy sector, currently leading finance at metrochem, one of the first domestic cathode manufacturers for Defense, storage and EVN markets. So super interesting area. We're excited to learn more about that. He first launched his career though in private credit financing, multiple asset platform growth strategies and funding over $300 million to growth stage companies across the US and EMEA. And as an operator at startups, he's raised over 200 million in private and government capital for high growth startups. So at metrichem, he's applying both his investor and his operated experience to drive that strategic growth by advising and managing investor board, customer and supplier partnerships alongside of course managing the company's financial controls. So everything from the budgeting to the accounting, the treasury, the forecasting and reporting. He is a busy guy. We are thrilled to have him here today with us for 30 minutes for this conversation. Vikas, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker B: Thank you Berna. I'm glad to be here and thank you for the uh, intro as well.

Speaker A: Oh, you're very welcome. I mean super interesting space that you work in. I also love your background as well. I love that diverse uh, range that you're bringing to the conversation today. So we will dig right in. Uh, but just to get us started, I like a nice warm up. Question we like to ask our guests is what initially sparked your interest in finance and what's kept you motivated along your journey? As we've seen, it's quite varied, uh, and diverse. So we'd love to hear what got you into it and what's kept you motivated along the way.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank uh, you for asking. Um, so, you know, I started my career in finance almost a decade ago. The primary motivation I would say was it felt like the right career that, you know, frankly my undergraduate degree lend itself to where I could still have a broad impact. When I first entered my career, I didn't actually know where I wanted to be 10, 15 years out, which nowadays everyone kind of seems to know. But at the time when I graduated I kind of knew I wanted to do something that was very challenging and demanding of myself and my youth, um, but also always knew that I wanted to have a broader impact on the world, um, whether, you know, it was through my career and my personal life. And so finance felt like a good training ground quite frankly. So I started my career on the buy side which for those who are in that industry, it's a, ah, sort of very rigorous training program. The first two years, um, primarily around, you know, identifying good opportunities, good companies to invest in, what's going right, what's going wrong. And so without even knowing, I fell into a space where I was learning a lot. You know, I was doing. It was very hard work. You know, we're working, you know, the crazy finance hours, um, as they say. But it was one where I learned very quickly, you know, what makes a business tick. And I realized that finance isn't just about, you know, investing or necessarily using money to make money. It was also I realized you could. It's a tool in, to basically, you know, have impact on the world. And there's a way to consciously do that in this current world if you can build the right businesses with the right people, um, and of course, the right capital as well. So that's really what. Why I started and then why I kind of stayed in this industry is, I think, given my investor experience in the past, now coupling that as an operator, I kind of have. I've continued to add pieces to, um, my toolkit on how to actually build businesses that have real impact on the world. So that's been very fulfilling. I always say you have to either be learning or earning, ideally both. And so that has, luckily for me, has continued to be true. And so that's sort of why I've stayed in this industry.

Speaker A: You know, that's so interesting and I love your perspective of the power of finance. The role it plays in getting you to fulfill your mission is to make a mark on the world. I thought that's super smart and very smart of a recent grad to spot that too, I would say. So. I know going through college you're thinking about finance, you're thinking about, you know, your, your balance sheets and everything like that, but actually you're thinking about the bigger picture of finance as a mechanism for driving change. And I think that that's, um, really, really interesting. And I know your career has spanned between East Coast, west coast as well, so you have followed those opportunities as they've come up, which, um, makes for a nice diverse experience set as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I am, Will always be a true New Yorker. I moved there when I was 16, and so that will never go away. And that's kind of part of who I am and how I work. Um, but, yeah, I think taking the risk of coming to California to be in Silicon Valley was, I think, a huge jump for me. But it was like I said earlier, right. I was earning a lot less, to be honest, but the learning opportunity was so large, um, and the ability to have impact in a way that startups do. Right. And having a hand in that growth was something that was very appealing to me, um, versus just being an investor on the cap table.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I will say if anybody else in the community today has that experience, do chime in and share your perspective on that as well. Uh, well, let's chat about your, your time today at metrochem. So tell us a little bit about your company. I gave a bit of an overview, but I'd love to hear it in, you know, basic terms. What is it that metrochem's mission is, how they're solving that and what's their differentiation market too? Because I think it's a really interesting space that you're in. And then we'll get into, you know, uh, that. The finance HUD after that.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. So Mitrachem M, you know, we're a series B startup. We've been around for four years. The primary vision of the founders when they started the company was to take, you know, how do we apply some of the tool sets that we are developing in the US today towards key critical materials that we currently don't have here, and how do we bring that back to the US So the thesis was how do we use something like machine learning to accelerate the development of these new materials or even really onshore existing materials that are dominated by, let's say, Asian players or geographies outside of the U.S. how do we bring that back to the U.S. in a way that one, we're bringing jobs back, we're bringing innovation back, and we're solving key supply demand imbalances that exist today, but then also setting up sort of the US as a champion of innovation in this critical industry, which is sort of inorganic materials. Um, as we get into this new decade of, you know, what I like to think of as like de globalization, where you're seeing a lot of industries and countries really focusing internally versus the last 50 years, which was about trade and globalization really opening up our borders. And so about four years ago or, uh, three years ago when I joined, the thesis that we had was there's this sort of value chain that exists where we've shipped a lot of manufacturing to China as a country, and we need to bring a lot of that back. But what we're really trying to solve is access to kind of innovation and growth, which is one of the core drivers of that is energy. Right. And how you distribute, store and really generate energy is a huge problem that there's, you know, the climate tech and climate industries like, you know, trying to solve. But what we were focused on is once the energy is actually generated, how do you store and distribute it in a You know, clean, safe, cheap way. And so that's really what Mitrichem focuses on is, you know, the cathode material, um, within batteries. Because we believe batteries are the key platform technology that in the future will be used to store and distribute energy. Right. It's something that impacts the grid, something that impacts the defense industry, which is very top of mind today for governments. And then of course the sexy, fun EV market, which I think is the most publicly facing application, uh, of batteries. But batteries are everywhere, right? And they've been forever. The technology that we work on, lfp, which is iron based cathodes, doesn't have any nickel cobalt. It's cheaper, it's cleaner, it's safer than pretty much anything that goes into a battery today. Um, it's actually been around for 20 years and it was actually initially invented in the US but we shipped it out to China to manufacture and so we've lost that edge. So the company really is about how can we use technology to not only bring existing technologies back to the US but then accelerate the development of new technologies and then also manufacture them here in the US and so to me that was a very impactful thesis, which is why I joined. Um, it felt like I always wanted to be a part of the energy movement and batteries as a platform technology. I'm a big build, you know, believer in you got to invest in the platform before you start building the application layer. And so that's really what attracted to me, me and I felt like I could have a hand in the growth from, from day one.

Speaker A: Amazing, I love that. And so tell us a little bit about um, what makes your finance challenges unique in this space. Because it is quite unique in the sense of it's a four year old company, you know, highly funded, obviously, you know, probably lower employee count. But tell us a little bit about what makes your finance challenges, ah, maybe a little bit different than other people they're facing.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think the profile of our company itself and this industry is very unique. Um, generally in Silicon Valley there's a lot of software based companies or asset light companies. Um, we're, you know, we're not necessarily asset heavy yet, but where we're headed is, you know, we're going to be building factories, right? And so these are, you know, half a billion dollar projects that we're going to be building. And so the way that we think about capital and the way that we think about finance is very different than the typical early stage startup or even, you know, mid level or public company that is just Focused on the control aspect of finance. Right. How, you know, how are you spending and how are you making money? For us, it's the working capital piece is a piece that I think about a lot and I think that's one of the more unique challenges that we have. Um, beyond that, I think some of the other more tactical challenges that have come up are things like procurement. Right. When I think it's a topic we'll touch on today, um, is you know, we, our supply chain is global and oftentimes the materials or the consumables that we're ah, procuring are coming from sort of family, uh, sort of family owned vendors in China or you know, smaller companies in Japan or you know, mines in Chile. So it's, it's a diversified geographic set, it's a diversified size of vendor and then it's also a diversified set of formality with each specific vendor and process. So when I first joined there was no real process for procurement. Um, but I think that was one of the biggest challenges was one, you know, how do we now take what is, you know, a global supply chain, you know, make it all very efficient and accessible and then deliver it to our company and purchasers who are primarily scientists. Right. Who generally are spending all of their time in the lab. And so I think that was like one of the big tactical challenges that wasn't that we didn't know upfront, but as we got into it we realized it was very unique to Metrochem and other biotech or materials companies that were doing R and D. Um, because the first few years are about R and D. Right. You're buying a lot of things, they're all cheap but they're all from all over the world. But then you have to very quickly transition and start building for the scale aspect, which is where we are now. How do you build a factory? And finance is all part of that. Right. So there's a lot of tactical challenges that have arisen from that as well now.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I guess you mentioned procurement is, is pretty complex or was non existent really when you needed a real formal process. So when you stepped into that current role, you know, what part of that spend process felt like it needed the most attention? I think it's probably at the very initiation on trying to gain control and visibility over spending. Um, and do you have any kind of concept of what was the root challenges of that? Was it just, you know, fast growth and figuring out as we go and then you need a more formalized system? But yeah, what was the kind of reush the pain point initially and then uh, what you think maybe caused that? Uh, and uh, you know, what were the kind of steps you took initially to kind of turn that corner?

Speaker B: It's a great question. Um, there's a lot of pain points but you know I think there's a lot of symptoms. I think the root cause was actually quite simple. Um, right. Like I think when we really started to do the work of identifying why do we have this sort of, you know, um, inefficient, broad, uh, spanning procurement process where we had sort of every single person at the company had a procurement card. Right. And everyone was purchasing um, whatever they wanted. There was no approval workflow.

Speaker A: So common as well we hear. Yes, launch ah up.

Speaker B: Exactly. I mean when you're starting a company, right, like the founders focus is on building the product. It's not about, let's you know, be sock compliant from day one. Right. And so I think for me, um, the root cause was primarily, you know, from a ton of day zero problems. Right. Where the way that things were being done from day one were just not from a scale forward perspective. And so when I came in, I think one of the things I did very quickly was let's just quickly um, identify right. Where are the root causes. So one thing for us was right, really focusing on approving the approval workflow number one. Number two, really focusing on purchase orders. Because a lot of the vendors that we work with do request pos and it's not sort of the typical let's go on Amazon and buy something. And so that was sort of multiple steps in a process that a lot of our scientists and purchasers just had never done before. And so purchase orders, approval workflows, um, and then spend cards was a big one for us. Right. Most of the company employees previously came from either large companies where they had dedicated spend spending limits per month or weekly and they could sort of decide when and where to buy which equipment from. Or they came from national labs or university labs where you know, if you're coming from Stanford, there's a very, you know, things are just there. Right. You're not really involved in procurement as a lab. Like the whole organization just has things that are purchased for them by a finance team that like sits in Palo Alto. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so spend cards, purchase orders, request or workflows. And then on top of all of that I think it was just visibility and reporting and insights like you said. Right. You have. So the first part was all about getting the workflows in place. So we can actually control the flow of cash. But then on top of that, not once we got that in place, it was, now let's take a look at how have we actually been spending. Right? So we needed a platform that would very quickly tell me as a two person finance team, where is the leakage or where are we spending where maybe we don't need to, or where is the breakage or even things as simple as what is taking so long in an approval. Right. Um, the metrics that I look for are very different than what a typical early stage company probably looks at. Like I look at number of clicks, right. Or time spent in the lab. And so what that means is my number one goal is not even spending the least amount of money. Right. It's really about how can I maximize the ROI on each minute that we have with each employee and how can we get them in the lab as much as possible. Right. Cause that's where the science happens. Um, so if they have to come out, take their gloves off, click a few buttons to purchase something, it's unavoidable. But my goal is to really minimize that process as much as possible so that they can spend their time doing the value added work in the lab.

Speaker A: So it's so interesting you say that because one of the differentiators for procurifying, uh, sorry, I think my wifi might have, uh, cut there. But one of the differentiators for Procurify is that ease of use. And we're not just talking for the finance teams, we're talking about company wide ease of use, which is so important for exactly the reasons that you mentioned. You want tools to be a bottleneck for your team. You want your team to be focusing on the mission of your organization, not on the admin back end to get things moving. And the other thing that comes to mind is also mobile functionality. So if you're on the, you know, the factory floor or wherever you are doing work today, you can do that work from your app. And again, it's super easy. It's in your pocket. You don't need to go somewhere, um, special to do it or log into any like massive system. It's just all right there in the app. So talk to me a little bit about, um, getting your technicians, your scientists, everybody on board with Procurify, you know, was it as easy for them? How did you go about change management? And for anybody listening today and another day, you know, that piece of, okay, I love this technology. I want to be using it. How do I get my team on board. Do you have any tips for them today?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, every finance professional knows this change management is the hidden, uh, Right. Like, uh, sort of problem that exists with being an operations leader. Right. Like no matter what you introduce, generally the employee population is going to resist it in some way. Um, and so like, it's not really how can you make it awesome, it's more like you'll never have a change management that people love because people just, it's in human nature to resist change, especially in the workplace. Um, and so it's more about how can we make it easier. Right. And I think procurify the implementation team. You know, I cannot say it enough, was extremely helpful and patient with us. And in fact I think some of the things they did that really helped us was um, one, you know, they're very open to creating full implementation guides. Right. To the point where, you know, I was really trying to get across that we have PhD scientists that sometimes find it difficult to follow procurement workflows just because they don't know what goes into procurement. Right. To a lot of scientists, finance is really there to buy things. Right. They don't really even understand the role of finance in a company and it's not their job too. So we never, we never, um, judge them for that. It's mostly about knowing that and then also knowing that there's only 2 of people on my team, so it's me and then, you know, my direct associate handling pretty much everything finance related. So we leaned very heavily on the procurified team to create the implementation guides, to lead trainings and to be open to answering any questions not only from us, but also from directly from our employees. Um, and probably to the point where they were probably just taking complaints at that point. But I think those were the things that really helped us and made us feel comfortable was that this was a true partnership. Um, and there's a lot of time spent in educating our workforce, um, on the new system. And so there was definitely some pushback in the beginning of sort of like, why are we doing this? And like, what is this procure ify thing? Um, but now, I mean, I think it's, you know, innate to how we do procurement at the company to the point where, you know, we always say, like, just put it on procure fight. Right. Uh, because everything goes in procure fight when you think about spend. And I think the platform has really evolved to touch on all the different pieces, um, that you need in procurement.

Speaker A: I love that. Just put it on procure for our new.

Speaker B: Uh, no, exactly. And last thing I'll say is, you know, the mobile piece you mentioned is so critical, right? Not even for the requesters as much as for the approvers, because, you know, we have middle managers and executives that we travel a lot. And like I mentioned, our business is, you know, in the us, in Asia, so we spend a lot of time in Korea, in China, in London, in Chile, in the US and so. But then on the other hand, the lab is in Mountain M View, and so somebody might need something that day because a piece of equipment broke and we might lose a whole 24 hours of work if we don't purchase something in the next five hours. But someone might be, you know, let's say in London, Right, but they're on a train or something. So the mobile app was a game changer for us because approvers could now, with a click of the button, no longer be a blocker. Because what we don't want to do is, you know, for the sake of efficiency, remove them from the approval process because we still need their eyes on it. Right. But getting onto a secure VPN on your laptop in a different location versus, you know, having a being able to just click one button on a. On a phone, I think that was a huge change for us and really unblocked a lot of kind of those initial problems, even after implementation.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's exactly it. You know, um, we have a new brand campaign called Procurify it. And one of the pieces that we talk about is do work wherever that happens. So whether that's for the folks in the labs, you know, whether they're oil tankers or whether, you know, as you say, you're. You're on the train and you need to approve something for your team. You don't want finance, you don't want procurement to be the blocker, but you do need that governance and compliance and understanding of the process and making sure that everything's crossed off and within budget and all of that visibility. So it's really solving those two challenges, and I love that. Um, and speaking of, we've talked about workflows, and it piqued my interest, especially in the space we're in. And the world we're in today is a hot topic, obviously, for all of these conversations that we have is around AI. So in marketing, obviously, AI is just bursting at the seams. There's no shortage of the time saved that we achieve as a team here at Procurify. I'd love to hear your perspective on finance, because I'm sure it's quite different to how we're adopting it, but how are you even observing, implementing, testing whether it's in finance or broader operations today at Metrichem?

Speaker B: Yeah, great question. I mean, AI is top of mind for everything. And I mean we're an AI forward company, um, in the sense that, ah, you know, our core value add. I think you mentioned differentiation at the beginning. You know, mitrachem, a big piece of what we do is AI and machine learning enabled development. And so, you know, there's a lot we have a whole software development team that works on how can we use a lot of the AI tools that exist today towards development, developing the actual core product. Um, and, but now when you talk about finance, right. I have a very different view than maybe our CTO does on this. Right. Which is finance is all about risk, it's all about getting the numbers right. It's all about, you know, having a very strong baseline upon which you make decisions. And so when I think about that, and I'm sure other finance leaders feel this way, there is sort of this ah, sense of, um, you know, prove me wrong, right, or prove me right in a sense when with a lot of AI tools. Um, and so my bar is very simple, which is, you know, let's be very real about what are the solutions, what are the problems that exist. Um, I'm a big believer in, you know, don't, um, you know, don't automate something that can be eliminated.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And you know, never delegate something that can be automated. Right. I think these are two rules that I try to live by when we talk about workflows. And so once you simplify, once we simplified our workflows, I think we identified areas where we could work with AI. Right. And AI, I think has been really good for ingestion of data and then being able to deliver sort of a synthesized takeaways or insights. But uh, when we think about generative AI or actually going out and doing agented work, where they're actually going and doing the workflows themselves, I think this is where we've paused a little bit because we're waiting for the technology to get to a place where we're looking at 97, 98, 99% accuracy, um, just because that's the bar that we have internally. Right. So what we don't want to do is introduce a tool that is performing at a lower level than the workflows we have today. But we're very open to trying new things, um, in closed systems. And so I Always tell my associates would love for her to go out there and find things that make our lives easier, but never at the expense of future problems. And so I think we're closely monitoring the space, um, but I do think we're probably six to 12 months away from seeing some of these workflows be fully automated.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. I think cautiously optimistic in the space that you're in makes uh, a lot of sense. And at Procurify, we are an AI powered, obviously spend management platform and it's really about how do we create visible AI. So it's enabling you to move even quicker in the platform with those greater insights with our latest and Insights release or our analyst as well, that chat functionality. So it's really about serving you your own data, not any ideas, um, about your data, which I think is where you can get into a little bit of trouble sometimes. So, um, I guess we're coming to the tail end, but I have like a couple of questions here to ask you. Um, I do want to prompt anybody online in case there's anything that speaks your interest. Please do drop it in there. We can absolutely follow up with you with an answer. Um, but I guess if you were starting from scratch today, so you talked about, you know, initiating a lot of foundational uh, workflows at your organization and really bringing a lot of order to how we're going to grow this organization. If you had to start from scratch today to transform that spend management, is there anything you do differently or anything in a different order that you would do?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think hindsight 20 20, um, and I think there's plenty of tactical things I would do differently. Starting with, like I said, addressing a lot of the day, zero problems. I think one of the big things I've seen in the early stage world, um, is when you're building a company is a lot of times people don't think about scale first until they hit an inflection point. They're very much in a move fast break things mindset in the beginning, which is great, but what happens then is you create a lot of technical debt later where you're unwinding a lot of processes, which is still fine. I think workflows can be changed overnight, but what cannot be changed is human behavior. Right. And I think that's a lesson that I've learned, um, pretty strongly. Especially when you're working with folks that don't really live in the finance or operational world like we all do. Right. When you have folks that their core goal is to develop A product or focus on R and D or you know, be on the factory line. You know, the goal for them is procurement ops. You know, it needs to be as easy as possible and ideally if there's no issues, that's a win already. Right? They don't need the fancy things. As long as what they need shows up in the lab and they can do their work, that's to them a win. Right. So it's our job to do everything behind the scenes to uh, make that happen. So I think the few tactical things I would do, number one is implement Procure five from day one. Um, I think that's a no brainer for us, you know, routing all of our spend cards, our approval workflows, our purchase orders. And I think one thing we didn't talk about is punch outs, right? M. I think one of the core value adds that we had with ProcureFi in the early days was, you know, your team had, the product was directly integrated with specific vendors that we were doing a lot of recurring purchases with almost daily at one point. So like McGranger, McMaster, Thermo, Fisher, some of these core vendors that supply a lot of the biotech and R and D space. Um, you know, we were, there was so much time lost in those early days with people going to these specific vendor websites, negotiating discounts, trying to purchase items, getting approvals. And all of this was happening through Slack email, the Wender website with Procurify. It's all in the same system and it's all in the same workflows against the budget that we've already implemented in Procurify. So if we had that from day one, I think, you know, our team would have just started thinking that way as well. Because I'm a big believer that, you know, workflows change human behavior and then human behavior changes workflows. So it's a cycle. So you have to pick a point and break that cycle if you don't do it right from day one. And so that's, I think the biggest thing I would do is just day one, think scale first, implement the workflows and then use Procure as the toolkit towards it. Um, and then I think beyond that, I mean it's really just education, right? I wish I had done more education in the first three years of the company on how procurement works and how finance actually enables growth. Um, I think even today, um, there are folks at the company that still think of finance as sort of a bill payer. Right. And not a enable, enabler of growth. If done properly. And so those are probably the two main things is just more education and from day one, implementing the toolkit, um, and rolling it out.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that I'm gonna be thinking about that day. Um, you know, think scale first. And I think that that's so important especially for a lot of our customer base. So those that are listening today are part of our customer community. You know, that's a lot of it where they've come, um, because they've evolved and now they've gone from an SMB company to a mid market organization. They're looking for a platform that fits their needs, um, but also ones that have actually started SMB and scaled up with us as well. So I think that scale first approach is really building that foundation and all to our mission around serving you today and then where you're going tomorrow. So absolutely love that. Uh, um, well, I guess my final question for you. So I mentioned we have a new brand campaign called Procurify it and really that's about, you know, that moment of aha when you're using the platform that says oh, that's so easy. That made my life so much better today and you mentioned it organically. But actually it is the mobile app as well because this is where I take pride in how quick I can improve these requests and know my budget day in, day out for all the variable spend that my team is, uh, is making. So I'd love to know, do you have a procurefy it moment? And it doesn't even need to be one, but is there something that you could really pinpoint that says, oh, oh, that just makes my day, my week or my team's life a little bit easier in our, um, in our quest to fill our, our brand's mission.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I'll give you two and um, I touched on earlier, but the two Procurify moments for me is one punch outs. I cannot understate the impact of having punch outs in Procurify, especially if you are in the R and D or biotech or chemical space because you're, you know, we procure from the same five vendors, um, for 70 to 80% of our spend and having all of that integrated in Procurify with the workflows, with the approvals, with the budget, with the spend cards, with the pos. It has completely changed the way we do procurement here and given so much time back to our scientists in the lab. Number two is the mobile app. I mean it's as you mentioned, I think being Able to approve on the go, especially with the company of 50 people, where at any given time 5 to 10 people are traveling, um, has again, given a lot of time back and a lot of time that was just wasted, right? We all knew we were going to buy the thing, but you just need someone to click and we need people's eyes on it, right? So that later they say, oh, we saw it. And so that was a huge thing. Um, but I almost thought of this question in a different way. Um, because, you know, we don't say procurify it, but we do say all the time, put it on procurefy. In fact, I think, you know, we're. My team is just me and one associate. Um, and outside of procurement, there's a lot of other work that I do do. Uh, so I think it's almost, uh, a sort of shield for me now where folks and my door is always open. Um, but when folks are like, hey, I need this purchase order. And like, hey, Vikas, can you look at this? Right? But I have to go talk to an investor or a board member. It's really easy for me now to say, hey, just put it on procurefy. Right? Because, um, there's nothing in spend that cannot go through procurify. And Procure for now has all the tools to make it easy, right? And so I think that was really my procurefy moment, which is every day being able to say, just put it on procurefy. No matter what it is, Spend cards, POS approvals, punch outs, all of it goes through procurify now for us.

Speaker A: Uh, that makes me so happy to hear, and I know our team be so happy to hear that too. So thank you. I'm glad we are delivering value for you and your team day in, day out, because that is really the base of our mission at procurify was to help organizations fulfill their mission. And by making that easy and for you to focus on the other work, that means that we have done our job. So thank you very much. I know the team will be thrilled to hear that. Well, I wish we could continue talking. I have so many questions. I wanted to get through so many more. But I do want to respect our audience's time and of course your time as well. So I will hesitantly wrap us up there. A, um, huge thank you to you, Vicus, for spending time with us today and for sharing your experiences so transparently. That's really what Spend Culture Community is all about, is getting everybody in the same room so we can learn from each other, look under the hood of finance and get some tippets on what we could be applying in our own organization. So tip of the iceberg today, but we do have tons of content with you, of course, that go through a deeper level, exactly the solutioning that you went through at your organization. So we'll be sure to share that with everybody online today, those of you that couldn't make it, and anybody that's tuning in through our podcasting as well, you will get the links as well. So if you'd like to stay up to date on more spend management content, I would suggest you head on over to purify.com resources and bookmark that tab because we release new content every week, so we're getting multiple pieces of content up there every week. So you can just check back in for more content that helps you in your daily spend management lives. And if you would like to hear more from Pro Fi ourselves on how to transform your spend management, so if anything today piqued your interest, we did just, um, throw up a poll there so you can click what is, um, applicable for you. If you're ready for a conversation or not quite yet. That's all good. Uh, or if you'd like to follow up at a later time, head on over to procurify.com and jump into our demo form. We will chat with you when you are ready for that. So until next time. Until next Ben Culture episode, um, I want to thank you and wish you all the best, everybody.