About Vendr

In the world of enterprise software, getting the best deal isn't just about negotiation skills—it's about having the right data. Through pricing benchmarks, negotiation support, and procurement automation, Vendr helps companies get the best possible deal on over 20,000 SaaS products from purchase to renewal.

Manual Processes Slowed Time to Insights

Over the years, they’ve accumulated 10s of millions of pages — order forms, vendor contracts, quotes, renewal notices, etc. — which hold the key to unprecedented pricing insights and added customer value. Unfortunately, the process to utilize this data for each customer required several days for in-house experts to aggregate the information and manually verify accuracy. It was clear that to scale this up to more customers, Vendr’s data engineering team needed a different approach.

From Complex Documents to Clean Data

Vendr’s technical teams were no strangers to document processing tools on the market. Over the years, they had tested and evaluated nearly every option — from legacy incumbent products, to building it in-house.

However, the technical requirements were immense. Vendr needed a solution that could handle 10+ types of documents — from lengthy 30-page legal agreements containing signatures and complex layout, to order forms with complicated table structures — all with 95%+ accuracy and seconds of latency.

Given the complexity of their documents, no solutions had been able to achieve the level of accuracy the business demanded — until Extend.

“We looked at multiple companies in this space and did a bake off. Extend had the best results, despite being one of the newer companies in the space. We felt confident that if they had something that was performing so well, they were going to be the ones to pick to grow and help us solve this problem long term.”

Matt Hodgson, CTO at Vendr

Rather than starting from scratch and reinventing an ingestion layer, Vendr used Extend’s document infrastructure to accelerate their roadmap by months. Vendr’s technical & product teams were able to rapidly iterate on prompts, understand edge cases in their documents, tune their models, and achieve their accuracy requirements for cleaned data. They could now focus their engineering resources on post-processing the data, feeding it through LLMs to generate reports, and shipping core experiences to their customers.

“Extend makes it easy for our team to iterate very quickly. Their processing infrastructure, APIs, models, evaluations tooling, workflow builder, and expertise all result in a solution that’s directly going to impact your accuracy and speed in production.”

Matt Hodgson, CTO at Vendr

Building new products powered by document intelligence engine

Armed with Extend, Vendr transformed their vast document repository into a first-of-its-kind SaaS pricing intelligence engine. This proprietary database now powers their entire product ecosystem — from their customer-facing Price Check tool to sophisticated reporting and analytics. What was once a static archive has become an evolving dataset, growing smarter with each new document processed.

“Working with Extend has allowed us to capture all the data in every single document that we have, and bring that intelligence to bear in a fully automated way.”

Matt Hodgson, CTO at Vendr

New Product: Price Check

Customers upload their quotes and Price Check instantly compares their pricing against market rates to ensure they’re getting the best deal on their purchase.

SaaS Market Trends Insights

With visibility into 20,000 products and 12,000 buyers, Vendr maps the pulse of the entire SaaS marketplace. For the first time, customers can understand not just their deals, but the entire landscape of SaaS procurement, armed with insights on category-level renewals, product rankings, and supplier behavior across the market.

https://www.vendr.com/insights/saas-trends-report-q3-2023

Conclusion

By unlocking the wealth of information trapped in their documents, Vendr has fundamentally transformed how companies approach software procurement. What began as a technical challenge in document processing has evolved into a comprehensive market intelligence engine. Through their partnership with Extend, Vendr has turned millions of static documents into dynamic insights, enabling new products that bring unprecedented transparency to SaaS buying.

"Through our partnership with Extend, Vendr has been able to crack a nut that we have been unsuccessful in cracking from the beginning of the business. We are now able to leverage all of the information that we have locked in our documents and provide amazing new experiences to our customers that they have been asking for years. It’s revolutionized the way we've done business.

Matt Hodgson, CTO at Vendr