scoutbee

German Gregor Stühler and Northern Irelander Lee Galbraith came from different countries and different backgrounds but faced similar challenges. At drive-technology manufacturer Wittenstein, Gregor saw the price of rare earth magnets rise ten-fold after China closed markets for such materials. Leading sales operations at Lidl, Lee saw how difficult it was to source simple items such as individual bags for bread. When fate brought them together at a gathering in L.A., they bonded over the difficulties of supplier discovery. That’s when they decided to solve this problem.

Despite increasing supply chain costs and complexity, rising geopolitical tensions, and concerns about sustainability, there is often no insightful, transparent and hyper-efficient way for companies to connect with suppliers. Private sector companies spend on average 43% of their total costs on external purchasing, yet many still knock on doors or rely on outdated black books of contacts and emails to find vital suppliers.

They found the final member they had been missing when they met Fabian Heinrich through a mutual introduction. Fabian had scaled several global companies for Rocket Internet in Asia and the Middle East.

Leveraging their combined knowledge of supplier discovery and building robust technology platforms across a range of geographies and industries, Gregor, Lee and Fabian founded scoutbee to create the procurement of tomorrow.

Scoutbee’s three products provide data about the relationships of more than one billion suppliers, let procurement professionals manage an entire RFI and RFP process from start to finish and manage supplier relationships long-term, taking the process down from months and dozens of hours of work to only a few days. Finally, customers can access customer-specific data lakes.

Scoutbee’s intelligent technology is already enhancing supplier discovery at major multinationals including Audi, Airbus and Bosch and has helped to save billions of dollars. Over the next 18 months, scoutbee aims to facilitate $100B in trading volume across high value global sectors including automotive, off-highway and industrial machining, aviation and retail.