The goal is to establish Raindrop as the industry’s preferred one-stop solution for the entire enterprise source-to-pay cycle: Vijay Caveripakkam, CEO of Raindrop

The Silicon Review

“As practicing procurement professionals, we saw gaps in current spend management software and without question knew we could do better.”

Raindrop, an Enterprise Spend Management platform provider, is a breath of fresh air in an industry in need of change, bringing rapid time to value, and ease of use as their calling cards. The term “industry disrupter” rapidly comes to mind.

Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Raindrop’s seamlessly integrated SaaS solution is scalable from SMB companies, all the way up to complex global enterprises. Built on the latest generation technology stack, Raindrop’s ease-of-use and rapid value attainment are responsible for a rapidly growing portion of the industry who have neither the time nor money for the big, bulky, and needlessly expensive ‘legacy’ providers.

What we, at The Silicon Review found in speaking with Raindrop’s CEO, Vijay Caveripakkam, is a fundamentally different approach to digitizing the management of suppler commitments. While answering a few of our questions, it became rapidly clear to us how Raindrop is the disruptive new standard in Enterprise Spend Management solutions, providing visibility and unparalleled capabilities in controlling ‘how and who spends money at your company’. Here’s further what Caveripakkam said.

Interview Highlights

Q. How does Raindrop digitize customers’ procurement processes? And how do the company’s cost-containment strategies benefit these customers?

Raindrop was created out of the realization by our co-founders of a significant gap in the large and ‘heavy’ current procurement digitization providers, and the inability to rapidly deploy SMB clients in a cost-efficient manner. As time went by, they also realized this necessity extends into the enterprise customer needs as well. Essentially, this made the Raindrop team create a one-stop, fully-integrated single-pane-of-glass SaaS solution, addressing the entire enterprise source-to-pay (S2P) cycle, from spend planning, supplier, sourcing, contracting, PO, payables, and on back through the renewal cycle. Raindrop’s co-founders have deep industry experience as subject matter experts in business transformation, sourcing and procurement. The goal is to establish Raindrop as the industry’s preferred one-stop solution for the entire enterprise S2P cycle, which Raindrop takes one step further and refers to the broader scope of the ‘Planning-through-Renewal’ cycle.

Raindrop provides a 360-degree view of the supplier. This includes all corporate spending, be they commodity acquisition patterns, savings and avoidance achieved, predicting opportunities and risk involved with external supplier spend, predicting future trends using machine learning of the client’s own spend data sets, as well as historical market performance relative to the client’s negotiation discount percentages across a large number of commodities. All this is tied to one key function—to provide business leaders with the capability to manage the outflow of money from one centralized portal.

Q. What’s Raindrop’s point of differentiation?

Raindrop has two key differentiations: 1). Speed to value attainment. 2). Ease of use. Gone are the days of needlessly expensive and long implementations of clunky software.Begin using Raindrop’s simple to use UI quickly and easily. As real Procurement practitioners, we’ve already used every other solution, know exactly what’s missing in the market, and are fulfilling this need. From analytics and planning, to supplier relationship management, contract lifecycle management, e-sourcing, and PO’s to payables, Raindrop has lived in our customers’ shoes for decades. Put simply, Raindrop’s platform provides overwhelming and rapid value in managing the outflow of our customers’ investments.

Q. About the future, where do you see Raindrop a couple of years from now?

In a couple of years, we expect Raindrop to be a globally-consumed leading solution in our market. Product ease-of-use and speed which customers can begin using Raindrop will drive the market going forward, and Raindrop will be leading at the forefront of this change.

Vijay Caveripakkam | CEO

A high-energy leader with proven skills in emerging technologies, Vijay Caveripakkam is an entrepreneur and technology leader with deep background expertise in software, sourcing/procurement, program management, IT operations, business transformations, mergers and acquisitions.

Prior to founding Raindrop, Vijay held several executive positions in the semiconductor and technology industries. His passion for building technology solutions to solve pressing business challenges is the bedrock on which Raindrop is built.

As an experienced world traveler, Vijay also loves working in a fast-paced, diverse, multi-cultural global environment. Combining executive and hands-on experience in Sourcing and Technology, Vijay’s vision for Raindrop as an industry-disruptive technology was set.