NEW CATEGORY · PROCUREMENT, AS AN API

Procurement,
as infrastructure.

Today every SaaS purchase takes weeks and a procurement team. We turn it into one API call. Vendor evaluated, policy enforced, an AI agent fires the negotiation — your code keeps moving.

Design partners onboarding now · we ship the API alongside your first transaction.
POST api.nexumlabs.ai/v1/transactions Run this →
// Submit a vendor transaction curl https://api.nexumlabs.ai/v1/transactions \ -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_..." \ -d '{ "vendor": "datadog", "category": "observability", "amount": 42000, "term": "annual" }'
→ 200 OK · 180ms
{ "id": "txn_8x2k9p", "vendor": "datadog", "decision": "approved", "checks": { "policy": "pass", "budget": "pass", "tprm": "pass" }, "negotiation": "queued", "webhook_eta": "~48h" }
The problem

Procurement is the last manual back-office function.

Every SaaS purchase still flows through a chain of humans, Slack threads, spreadsheets, and approval emails. The cost is hidden in cycle time, missed savings, and engineers context-switching to fight finance. We're shipping the API alongside our first 10 design partners — be txn_0001.

Today
  • ~6 weeks from request to signed contract
  • 8–12 humans in the loop per deal
  • No audit trail a compliance team would trust
  • Policy lives in a Confluence page
  • First-ask price on long-tail SaaS
With Nexum
  • ~180ms for the decision, ~48h for the close
  • 1 API call from the system that needed the vendor
  • Signed rationale on every transaction
  • Policy is code — versioned, replayable
  • Auto-negotiated against vendor benchmarks
Why now

Three forces converged in 2025.

Procurement-as-an-API isn't a feature. It's what happens when AI agents become reliable enough to negotiate on your behalf, dev-led adoption reaches finance, and SaaS sprawl breaks every existing tool.

01

Agents can finally negotiate

Multi-turn vendor conversations with structured concession ladders are tractable on frontier LLMs (GPT, Claude). For the first time, "the agent ran the negotiation" survives audit and closes against your floor — not the vendor's anchor.

02

Finance is going dev-led

Ramp, Mercury, Stripe Tax — the next-gen finance stack is API-first. Procurement is the last function that still ships as a workflow tool. Devs are ready for the primitive.

03

SaaS sprawl broke the desk

The median company runs 250+ SaaS contracts. No procurement team can renegotiate them all. The long tail leaks 10–20% — automation is the only path that scales.

The shape

Four steps. One endpoint.

Same flow on the landing page, in the demo, and in production. Receive, evaluate, decide, fire the webhook — your code keeps moving while the negotiation runs async.

01 · Receive

POST a transaction

One endpoint. Send vendor, amount, category, term. Anything from a $200 SaaS seat to a $2M services contract.

POST /v1/transactions
body: { vendor, amount, category }
02 · Evaluate

Checks run in parallel

Policy, budget, third-party risk, vendor history — checked simultaneously against your config. Each returns a signed pass/fail rationale.

checks: policy · budget · tprm · history
latency: ~180ms
03 · Decide

Approved, escalated, or refused

The engine returns a signed decision with full rationale. Your code keeps moving. No human in the synchronous path.

decision: approved | escalated | refused
artifact: signed rationale
04 · Fire webhook

Negotiation closes async

Agent opens the vendor thread, runs the concession ladder, captures the signed counter, and posts to your webhook with the final contract.

event: transaction.completed
artifact: contract · audit-log
What you get

A procurement team, behind one endpoint.

Four capabilities ship the moment you authenticate. No onboarding. No rules engine to configure first. Sensible defaults that adapt to your spend as the engine learns.

D

Decision Engine

Policy + budget evaluation in milliseconds. Per-category caps, per-owner thresholds, fiscal-period awareness. Every decision returns a signed rationale.

target sub-200ms decision · signed rationale
N

AI Negotiation

Vendor comms handled automatically. Email-based, structured concession ladder, walk-away-aware. Closes against your floor, not the vendor's anchor.

target auto-close vs benchmark · auditable thread
C

Compliance Layer

SOC 2, DPA, TPRM, DPIA — checked against vendor record. Flags missing artifacts and routes to the right reviewer when needed.

checks SOC2 · DPA · TPRM · DPIA
O

Outcome Tracking

Every decision recorded, every negotiation indexed. The engine learns your tolerance and improves over time.

surface dashboard + API + webhook
Negative space

What Nexum is not.

New categories live or die by what they refuse to be. Here's where we draw the line.

Not a procurement workflow tool.

If your job-to-be-done is "route a request through 7 approvers," buy Zip or Coupa. Nexum is the API that runs after the workflow decides to buy.

Not a brokered savings service.

No humans in our path. If you want a negotiator on retainer for $500K+ deals, hire Vendr. We're the primitive for the long tail your broker won't touch.

Not a spend dashboard.

Dashboards observe. We act. Outcome tracking is a side-effect — the product is the decision the engine made and the negotiation an AI agent ran while you were doing something else.

Where this fits

A different category — infrastructure, not workflow.

Vendr

Brokered savings

Humans negotiate your largest contracts deal-by-deal. Right call when one broker pays for themselves on a $500K+ deal. Not API-first, not embeddable.

Nexum API

Procurement as a primitive

One endpoint. Decision in seconds. Negotiation async. Plug it into your finance stack, ERP, or your product. Built for the long tail of every other vendor decision.

Zip

Intake + workflow

UI for routing requests through approvers. Right call when policy is human judgment by design. Not API-first, not embeddable.

Vendr brokers the whales. Zip routes the workflow. We're the API for every transaction in between.
Before you auth

What devs ask first.

You have customers yet?

Not paying customers. We're talking to design partners now and shipping the API alongside their first transaction. If you want to be transaction txn_0001, this is the moment — pricing, scope, and roadmap are still being shaped by the first cohort.

Is this just an LLM in a trench coat?

The negotiation agent uses frontier models (GPT, Claude, swap-able) for the multi-turn vendor conversation, yes. But the decision engine is deterministic — policy, budget, and TPRM checks are code, not prompts. You get a signed rationale you can audit, not a vibes-based outcome.

What's the policy model — is it generic or custom?

Config-driven. You define category caps, owner thresholds, fiscal-period rules, and vendor allowlists in a JSON config or the dashboard. Override a decision and the engine learns the override pattern. Generic defaults ship for fast onboarding.

How do I audit a decision?

Every decision returns a signed rationale. Full request/response/check log per transaction at /v1/transactions/:id/audit. Replayable. We're targeting SOC 2 Type II for GA.

What does it write back to?

Webhook-first — anything HTTPS works on day one. Native ERP/finance integrations land with design partners — we build the adapters you need, not the ones we guess at.

What if a transaction exceeds our policy cap?

Returns "decision": "escalated" with reason and a routing target (owner email or Slack channel). You own the human-loop branch — we hand off cleanly. Try the $2M scenario in the demo.

What's pricing?

Not yet. We're holding pricing until the first cohort tells us what the value is. Design partners get pricing locked at launch.

Be txn_0001.

Design partners onboarding now. We ship the API alongside your first real transaction — pricing, scope, and integration shaped by the first cohort. Reply within 24 hours.

Or email alex.chang@nexumlabs.ai directly. We respond within 24 hours.