How Coupa’s Rossum Acquisition Advances AP Automation

Hello, everyone. It's Colleen Call at Techstrong TV. We're still at Coupa Inspire 2026.

Lots of conversations still going on. And with me now is Zack Hemmett-Lowe, Rossum's Chief Sales Officer, and we have some really good news that debuted yesterday, really good news. Coupa just acquired Rossum, and Zack is going to tell us more about it.

So Zack, thank you for joining us. No problem. Thank you for having me.

Of course. And, what's the buzz in the hallway about this acquisition? It's really good news on everybody's part.

It definitely is. So give us the perspective. So look, Coupa and Rossum have been partners for coming up to two and a half years now.

And I think the synergies between the two businesses have always been pretty well understood. We're an intelligent document processing platform. So what we effectively do is we take unstructured invoices, PDFs, et cetera, many of the financial transactional documents, and we- Nice ...

process them down into ERP systems, and we normalize the data. We simplify the data and make it actionable, so that platforms like Coupa, SAP, et cetera, can process that data. And that's the structure of what we've been doing for the last couple of years.

And as a business, we're nine years old. Yeah. Nine years.

Started in the AI space. Yeah. You're nine years old, and they're celebrating their 20th anniversary.

Yeah. There we go. Yeah.

Now you're family. We are. Part of a village.

Yeah. So again, the timing is fantastic. For someone who just heard the news, because we've known the past two days, start from the beginning.

You told us what you do, but start from the beginning when you knew that this partnership was going to happen. Yeah. So I think the partnership itself, I think there's many technology announcements or partnerships or acquisitions- Mm-hmm ...

that happen every single day. But there are certainly a symbiosis or synergies between what we've been doing. Mm-hmm.

This is not a surprise, I don't believe, in many of the Coupa world, the employees, the customers, as we share a shared vision of what we're trying to achieve, both for our customers- Certainly ... but more importantly- Yeah ... we already have a good base of joint customers together.

So we have over 50 shared customers that are harnessing the power of both Coupa and Rossum. Mm-hmm. And I think when you think about the buzz or you ask the questions on the buzz, it's really the excitement of how can we help the rest of the Coupa customer base to share the same vision and the results and the success of the existing customers that we share together.

Okay, Zack. Of course, this acquisition is very important and it's big news, of course. So what does this acquisition mean for Rossum and Coupa in general, and what does it mean to its customers?

So for Rossum and for Coupa, I think if we start on Rossum. Sure. Rossum has been a fantastic capability, and we've already got a great base of Coupa customers, and we share many of those Coupa customers.

Mm-hmm. What it means for Rossum is we now have access to a much larger capability set of different Coupa customers that we can then bring the power of Rossum to, certainly in that enterprise structure. What it means for Coupa is, again, it's adding more of the agentic capability.

Yeah. So working with Rossum's transactional large language model, that will enable them to continue to drive better capabilities for their customers. It will strengthen and bolster Coupa's AP automation capabilities- Mm-hmm ...

to drive more back to all of their customers. So what it means for the customers, I think it means that they can continue to extend the power of the Coupa solution. Mm-hmm.

So Coupa's been fantastic at the autonomous spend management when it comes to procurement lifecycle. Definitely. Now we really bolster the AP, the accounts payable module, to really deliver both the spend management and the accounts payable structure.

They'll be able to use the different datasets in both worlds, and that'll continue to drive enhancements in both the automation across the board- Yeah ... as well as the efficiencies that Coupa have always continued to deliver with all of their customers. And that makes sense.

Now, speaking of the customers, people who've already been using Coupa, what actually changes for them with this acquisition? Yeah. If anything changes.

Yeah. I don't think so. Nothing necessarily changes for...

Well, nothing changes, really, if you're a Coupa customer. I think what it does is it gives them even more capability. Mm-hmm.

So if you think around Coupa and the process as a whole, Coupa have always been fantastic at the procurement cycle and the P2P piece. Mm-hmm. What I think this really does, the acquisition strengthens the invoice area of the Coupa proposition.

Mm-hmm. So for those customers before that perhaps were using additional technologies, or they were looking at payment, treasury, all of those different areas, what we're now doing is combining those, bringing them together so that there is a true end-to-end invoice to pay or AP automation solution that these customers can continue to adapt and use on top of what is very commonly the majority of the Coupa solution in the procurement or the autonomous spend world. Yeah, that's nice.

Okay. Explain, your AI is called Rossum Aurora? Correct.

And since AI seems to be the big deal- Yeah ... the next few days. Well, probably for the last few days, and probably for the rest of our lives.

All right. Do you want to describe that or say more about it? Yeah, sure.

So Rossum Aurora is the transactional large language model- Mm-hmm ... that Rossum have. Now, if you think about the DSLM or the what Coupa have been talking around- Mm-hmm ...

and they obviously have their very large dataset. Yes. Rossum has just as a similarly large dataset of annotated transactional documents.

Oh, but not 10 trillion. Not 10 trillion, but a very large dataset. Yes.

Combining both of those datasets is what really drives the excitement across the orgs. Mm-hmm. So what we're going to be able to do is use Rossum transactional large language modelSupport that with the Coupa AI, with all of that data set.

Mm-hmm. And then deliver the mutual benefits across all of our customer base. So training different models, working on different areas to now allow us and allow the customers to process documents quicker, understand transactions, drive automation within their environment, and so on and so forth.

Oh, that's fantastic. So now, someone watching who might be a little bit skeptical when acquisitions happen, what would you say to them? Why is this one different?

So I think it's different because of where we are. Mm-hmm. Right?

I mentioned earlier, this is not an acquisition where things are very new, or we need to figure out how things are going to work. We're building this acquisition on a base of actually real success already. Right?

We've got many customers, many of them, even the keynotes this morning we had- Yes ... NFI and Deliveroo, both Rossum and Coupa customers. So speaking of the benefits that we've got, I think actually when it comes to these sorts of pieces, we're building on a framework of success.

So for Coupa customers, they get to work and understand that the acquisition is something which is already in place, right? All of this is an evolution of the partnership, and driving deeper connectivity between the two platforms will ultimately lead to better outcomes for the Coupa customers. That's fantastic.

So your experience the last couple of days, what do you intend to bring back to your team back in London? In London. In Prague.

In Prague, yeah. All over the place. All over.

Yeah. All over the place. I think, look, it's excitement.

I'm sure we've heard, if you think about the different teams. Our Prague teams, I mentioned earlier, we're nine years old. Yes.

The team in Prague are incredible, right? We've got an amazing team of developers, AI engineers that have worked incredibly hard to make the product what it is today. I think what they've seen is the success and the collaboration, and the excitement is now really booming.

So what they've worked on and where we've worked to work on 300 plus customers, we now have access to 3,000 and more Coupa customers that we can then go and bring the technology they've worked so hard on to then come into there. The buzz in the arena, the buzz in the event- Yeah ... has been insane.

Good. The Coupa teams, the Coupa customers are excited, and I think there's been great feedback in terms of what the acquisition means for Coupa and for Coupa customers. And actually, I know that the Coupa employees are excited to talk to their customers and help them to broaden their use of Coupa, broaden their capability stack, and take things forward from there.

I do thank you for joining us for this conversation. I learned a lot, of course. And stay tuned for more conversations at Coupa Inspire on Techstrong TV.

More to come.