Garching n. Munich, 06.02.2020. UVC Partners is pleased to announce the successful acquisition of portfolio company Orpheus by McKinsey & Company. Orpheus is a pioneer in the procurement software space with its specialized spend analytics and savings management solution. UVC Partners provided the company with an initial seed investment in 2012. Back then, the procurement software market was still rather a niche market mainly consisting of administrative and operational systems but was completely lacking analytical and data-driven solutions. The Orpheus team developed a powerful procurement performance management suite and was an early mover in including AI into its product to automate data classification and predictive analytics.
Based in Nuremberg, and today with a strong customer base across industry sectors, Orpheus has a reputation for delivering quality and value in automated data extraction, AI-enabled spend categorization, spend and category prescriptive and predictive analytics, including software agents (BOTs) and procurement impact tracking.
Dr. Ingo Potthof, Managing Partner at UVC Partners said: “Based on its solid technology and deep domain expertise the team has been consistently winning one blue-chip customer after the other to become a real category leader. They built a profitable growth company by hardly burning cash and by doing so creating a strong return for us as investor. Congratulations on this impressive achievement: Jörg Dittrich, Michael Lauer, Christian Ruck, Jörg Mengeler, Marco Pachovsky, Matthias Schumann and the full Orpheus team. Thank you for having been part of this journey and good luck for the future.”
With this acquisition, McKinsey intends to establish a new service that will enable spend transparency, spend and cost analytics, and value capture management. The offering is a combination of Orpheus’ advanced platform technology and McKinsey’s industry expertise and content-rich services in digital procurement.
Jörg Dittrich, Founder, and CEO of Orpheus said: “We really want to thank UVC Partners and especially Ingo for the comprehensive support in developing Orpheus from an idea to an established software company through all stages and challenges of a startup over the years. This expertise was also extremely valuable guiding us founders through this acquisition process. Now, we’re excited about joining forces with McKinsey. Together we can create a much richer solution and service offering that – with a single focus on driving impact for clients – is truly something new and differentiated in the space.”
Philipp Radtke, McKinsey Senior Partner and global co-leader of the Operations Practice, said: “We’re delighted to welcome Orpheus GmbH to McKinsey. The new service will offer clients deeper and more consistent insights into opportunities for spend optimization through an innovative combination of data, software, category sourcing expertise, and services."
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Unternehmertum Venture Capital Partners (UVC Partners) is a Munich- and Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm that invests in technology-based startups in the areas of industrial technologies, enterprise software and mobility. The fund typically invests between € 0.5 - 3m initially and up to € 12m in total per company. Portfolio companies benefit from the extensive investment and exit experience of the management team as well as from the close cooperation with UnternehmerTUM, Europe’s leading innovation and business creation center. With over 240 employees and more than 100 industry partners, UnternehmerTUM can draw from many years of experience in establishing young companies. This cooperation enables UVC Partners to offer startups unique access to talent, industry customers, and other financial partners. The portfolio includes investments such as Blickfeld, Carjump (Free2Move), FlixBus, KONUX, TWAICE and Vimcar.
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