The happy path belongs to the system. The exceptions belong to your team.
Khotan builds the software for the second half of that sentence.
Backed by
We will name our investors and advisors here when we are able to.
- Lead investor
- Investor
- Angels
- Advisors
We build in the gap the systems agree to ignore.
Every procurement team we spoke to had already bought the right systems. An ERP holding the transactions. A purchasing system holding the orders. A contract system holding the agreements. None of them were the problem.
The problem was everything those systems agree to ignore. A delivery date that changed in an email. A supplier that exists three times under three spellings. An invoice that does not match its order for a reason someone has to go and find. A renewal that arrives before anyone has assembled the evidence to negotiate it.
That work never appears in a system diagram. It appears as a team of experienced people spending the week searching, comparing, chasing, and re-entering. The happy path belongs to the system of record. The exceptions belong to the team.
The obvious fixes had all been tried. Integration moves records without making them agree. A dashboard names the exception and leaves the work exactly where it was. A transformation programme replaces systems that did not need replacing, and spends a year doing it.
So we build in the gap instead. We connect the sources one process depends on, reconcile the records that describe the same supplier or the same order, encode the rules and exceptions a team already applies by hand, and put the result into software those people can run. The accepted outcome goes back into the system that owns it.
Start with the process that costs the most repeated work. Measure it. The connections, reconciled records, and rules it leaves behind are what make the second process cheaper than the first.
Four commitments we are happy to be held to.
They decide what we take on, and what we turn down.
- The application is the proof
- Nobody buys a foundation. They buy work that got done. We hold ourselves to whether the process changed, not to whether the architecture is elegant.
- Existing systems stay
- Your ERP is not the enemy. The gap between it and everything else is. We are not in the replacement business and we will say so early.
- A person approves what matters
- Human review on consequential actions is a product decision, not a compliance concession. Autonomy is something you grant deliberately, per action, after the work has earned it.
- Narrow, then compound
- One bounded process with a measure attached. We would rather be judged on a workflow that works than on a roadmap that sounds impressive.
Half of us have been the person doing the chasing.
Infrastructure engineers and people who have run procurement operations from the inside, deliberately weighted toward the second group. Writing the software was never the constraint. Knowing what the software has to be right about is.
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Forward-deployed engineering
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Procurement operations
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Data foundation
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Applications
One team owns the whole path.
No relay between a data vendor, an integrator, and an application team. Every step below happens inside the same group of people, and the engineer who traced your process is the one still answering for it in month four.
- Process tracing
- Stakeholder interviews
- System access and permissions
- Source connection
- Schema mapping
- Entity resolution
- Supplier deduplication
- Document extraction
- Email and thread parsing
- Data quality rules
- Reconciliation logic
- Rule capture
- Exception design
- Approval routing
- Audit trail
- Application design
- Interface build
- Writeback to the system of record
- Rollout and training
- Measurement
- Month-four support
What gets said when we are not in the room.
Coverage, and posts from people whose operations we work inside. Every card links to the original rather than reprinting it.
Awaiting real postsThe happy path belongs to the system of record. The exceptions belong to the team. Almost nobody builds software for the second half of that sentence.
Time to be confirmed
The procurement teams I work with have already bought the right systems. What they do not have is agreement between them: a supplier under three spellings, a date that moved in an email, an invoice that will not match. That gap is where the week actually goes.
Khotan raises a funding round led by Y Combinator.
The company builds procurement applications on top of the systems its customers already run, and owns delivery from data through to deployment.
Come and build the awkward half.
We are hiring engineers who want to work inside a real operation. If you would rather be on the other side of the table, bring us the process that costs your team the most.