Coupa buys Tonkean to boost autonomous spend management

Coupa has acquired Tonkean, adding intake and orchestration software to its spending and trade platform.

The deal is Coupa's fourth in a run of acquisitions tied to its push into autonomous spend management, following earlier purchases of Cirtuo, Scoutbee and Rossum.

Tonkean develops software that lets staff submit and track requests through a natural-language interface and helps companies route work across procurement, finance, and other internal teams. Coupa said combining Tonkean's orchestration tools with its own artificial intelligence products and transaction data will strengthen that offering.

Coupa says its network includes more than 3,500 buyers and 10 million suppliers, built on a community dataset worth $10 trillion. It says it has delivered more than $300 billion in value through that network.

Acquisition strategy

The deal extends Coupa's broader buying campaign as software vendors race to combine workflow automation, document processing, sourcing tools and data in a single system. Coupa has positioned those pieces as part of what it calls an agentic trade network, designed to manage purchasing and supplier transactions with less manual intervention.

Chief Executive Officer Leagh Turner linked the acquisition to that strategy.

"The acquisition of Tonkean is game-changing for Coupa and the market. For twenty years, we've built a global trade network that brings together buyers and sellers for the purpose of optimizing trade and spend. To date, we've delivered more than $300 billion of value to that network and amassed a dataset of $10 trillion. To deliver the promise of increasingly autonomous execution of transactions between buyers and suppliers, you need three main things: industrial-grade and unified orchestration, best-in-class buyer and supplier workflows, and clean, trusted data. With the acquisitions of Rossum and Tonkean, in short order, we have now amassed all the assets to make this promise possible for both buyers and suppliers at a time when buying and selling is getting more complex and costly. We couldn't be more excited to welcome Sagi and the Tonkean team to Coupa," Turner said.

Procurement software providers have been working to connect systems that once handled intake, approvals, supplier discovery, invoice reading and payment separately. That integration matters because procurement and finance teams often still rely on manual handoffs between tools, creating delays and making oversight more difficult.

Workflow focus

Tonkean's software includes a no-code process builder and more than 250 native connectors, allowing customers to integrate workflows with existing systems rather than replace them, according to Coupa. The company also said Tonkean supports multi-agent orchestration and agent-to-agent coordination, meaning software agents can pass tasks to one another within longer business processes.

Coupa said Tonkean's interface has led to a 2.2-times increase in user adoption, while the combined workflow tools can cut cycle times by 50% and save operations teams more than 30 hours a week.

Coupa Chief Product and Technology Officer Salvatore Lombardo described the transaction as part of a wider product plan.

"This is a deliberate, strategic step toward building the #1 agentic trade network and delivering autonomous spend management at speed and scale like no one else in the market," Lombardo said. "We've assembled the ultimate procurement toolkit: a $10 trillion data foundation, eyes to read any document, intelligence to source smarter, and now the ultimate engine to orchestrate modern, agentic work. Tonkean brings a 100% no-code process builder and 250+ native connectors that wrap seamlessly around customers' existing architecture. This delivers advanced orchestration and unified integrations on day one with zero rip-and-replace. With Tonkean natively embedded in Coupa, customers get best-in-class orchestration and the best spend platform they already trust, in a single, unified agentic architecture."

For suppliers, the integration is intended to make it easier to connect with multiple buyers through application programming interfaces that support one-to-many links, Coupa said. That could matter for suppliers selling into several large corporate procurement systems and looking to reduce the effort required for onboarding and transaction management.

Tonkean was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, with research and development in Tel Aviv. The company has focused on internal service workflows in areas such as procurement and legal, using configurable templates and no-code tools to help businesses build request-and-approval processes.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Sagi Eliyahu said the company sees the combination as a route to broader customer reach.

"We couldn't have created a more powerful combination in the market than joining forces with Coupa, unlocking tremendous value to customers far and wide," Eliyahu said. "With our industrial-grade intake and orchestration now serving as the backbone and foundation for their industry-leading agentic trade network and data, we will seamlessly connect buyers, sellers, and agents in a unified way to deliver autonomous trade in a way that no other company can match, and in turn drive exponential business value for customers. This massive opportunity greatly excites my team and me, and we are thrilled to join Coupa."