Coupa Software was founded in 2006 by Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner in San Mateo, California. Stephens had worked at SAP on procurement software and saw an opportunity to build a cloud-native alternative that was easier to deploy and use. The name Coupa comes from a neighborhood in San Mateo.
The Coupa Business Spend Management (BSM) platform covers the entire spend lifecycle: procurement, invoicing, expense management, sourcing, contract management, supply chain design, and treasury. The platform helps organizations control what they spend, how they spend it, and with whom.
Coupa’s Community Intelligence is a key differentiator. The platform anonymously aggregates transactional data across its customer base to provide benchmarks and recommendations. It can suggest better suppliers, flag pricing anomalies, or identify risk based on patterns observed across thousands of companies.
The company went public in 2016 and grew rapidly, reaching annual revenue of approximately $830 million. In 2023, Thoma Bravo acquired Coupa for $8 billion, taking it private. The deal was one of the largest enterprise software take-privates in recent years.
Coupa serves more than 3,000 customers that collectively manage over $6 trillion in cumulative spend through the platform. Major customers include Sanofi, Salesforce, and Unilever. The platform processes millions of transactions and invoices monthly.
Under Thoma Bravo’s ownership, Coupa has focused on expanding its AI capabilities and deepening its supply chain management features. The company employs more than 5,000 people globally and competes with SAP Ariba, Oracle Procurement Cloud, and Jaggaer in the business spend management market.
