Certa, a startup helping enterprises speed up the process of onboarding new suppliers, today announced that it has closed a $15 million early-stage funding round.

San Francisco-based Certa, incorporated as Opinr Inc., said that Point72 Ventures led the Series A round. Prominent tech entrepreneur and investor Justin Kan, Dropbox Inc. Chief Executive Officer Drew Houston, Mantis VC and a number of other backers contributed as well.

Onboarding a new supplier can involve a great deal of manual work for large organizations. For example, if a company deploys a business intelligence tool from a new software provider, the information technology team has to check that the tool meets cybersecurity requirements. The legal and finance departments then must sign off on the deal as well. The exact steps involved in onboarding a supplier often vary from project to project. 

Certa provides a cloud-based platform that enables companies to manage all the different steps involved in onboarding suppliers through a single interface. According to the startup, its platform can speed up onboarding by as much as 300%.

“The modern business ecosystem requires an increasing amount of collaboration between companies, but the process for enabling this cross-company cohesion is often a manual, time-intensive experience,” said Certa founder and Chief Executive Officer Jag Lamba. “It doesn’t need to be this way. Our platform was built out of necessity to help our customers onboard third-party vendors, partners and customers quickly and efficiently so they can get back to business.”

When a company onboards a new supplier, Certa can run an automatic risk assessment to find potential problems such as issues with the supplier’s cybersecurity posture. The platform assigns a risk score to each firm based on the number and severity of the issues that its algorithms find. The various stakeholders involved in managing work with a supplier, such as the finance and legal teams, can use the insights surfaced by Certa to inform their business decisions. 

Certa also surfaces new issues that emerge after the supplier onboarding process is completed. The platform can, for example, detect if a cloud provider fails to uphold its service-level agreement, or SLA, with a customer. An SLA is a contract ensuring that a cloud provider’s platform won’t experience technical issues such as excessive amounts of downtime. 

The company’s platform includes tools for managing the various business documents involved in a company’s supplier management efforts. Users can create contracts with the help of a built-in template library, as well as configure document approval workflows when multiple stakeholders are involved. In the background, Certa captures every change made to a document using a built-in audit tool to help companies meet compliance requirements. 

Certa says its platform is gaining significant market traction. In the tech industry, the startup counts big names such as Uber Technologies Inc. and eBay Inc. among its customers. Certa says its platform is also used by some of the world’s largest retailers, aerospace firms and credit card companies, among other organizations.

“We believe Certa has the potential to redefine how businesses work and grow together,” said Point72 Ventures partner Tripp Shriner. “Whether a vendor, customer or partner, there is a growing demand to find the most secure, efficient and comprehensive way to integrate and scale business processes. Certa allows businesses to automate the third-party journey so they can move faster and focus on what’s most important.”

Image: Certa