By Jon W. Hansen | Procurement Insights
There is something genuinely admirable about what both Coupa and ORO Labs set out to do.
Two founding teams. Two generations apart. Both walked away from dominant, well-resourced employers — Oracle and SAP Ariba respectively — not because they had to, but because they believed they could do something better for the practitioners their employers were failing. That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the most honest diagnosis of what is wrong with enterprise procurement technology: the people closest to the failure understood it best, and they left to fix it.
The question this post asks is not whether those intentions were genuine. They were. The question is what happens to genuine intentions when capital finds them — and whether the ORO arc is already beginning to mirror the Coupa arc this archive has been documenting since 2008.
The Oracle-Coupa Story: Noble Origins
Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner built Oracle’s iProcure product line. They were instrumental in establishing what Oracle positioned as its procurement future — and they watched it fail practitioners repeatedly, for the same structural reason every time. Oracle’s architecture demanded that practitioners adapt to the system. The system did not adapt to practitioners. User resistance was treated as a training and change management problem rather than a design failure. Implementation success rates told the real story, but the industry had learned to stop measuring them because the numbers were too damaging to discuss.
When Stephens and Eisner left Oracle in 2006 to found Coupa, they named the problem explicitly: the company existed to tackle “the problem at the root of most e-procurement failures — employee noncompliance.”
That is a precise behavioral diagnosis from people who had seen the failure mechanism operate at close range. Coupa’s early platform reflected it — affordable, accessible, designed to be adopted rather than implemented, built around how practitioners actually worked rather than how Oracle’s architecture required them to work.
I began covering Coupa in September 2008 — before any major analyst firm had placed them on a quadrant or a wave. My assessment was straightforward: this platform represented what the market had been promising for years and failing to deliver. In 2009 I wrote what is likely the industry’s first formal independent white paper on Coupa Software. The title captured what I saw: “Redefining Procurement: How Coupa has Bridged the Gap Between What is Known and What is Possible.”
By 2011, Coupa invited me to write a five-part series for their own Coupa Cabana blog. Part one generated 2,523 impressions against their normal average of 500. The platform was doing what its founders had set out to do. The noble intention was producing real practitioner outcomes.
Did Coupa Succeed After PE Funding?
The honest answer is: it depends on how you define success — and for whom.
By the market’s conventional measures, Coupa succeeded extraordinarily. IPO in 2016. $169 million raised in the private markets before going public. Approximately $1.21 billion in annual recurring revenue by 2025. Acquisition by Thoma Bravo at $8 billion in February 2023. Its first GAAP profitable year came in 2025 — seventeen years after founding. By investor and capital market standards, that is an unambiguous success story.
By the practitioner’s measure — which is the measure Stephens and Eisner built the company to satisfy — the story is more complicated.
The Hansen Fit Score™ applied longitudinally across Coupa’s five ownership phases tells it numerically. At founding in 2006: 6.3. At the pre-IPO growth peak: 6.8. At the public company peak in 2022: 5.0. Post-Thoma Bravo in 2023: 4.6. Forward forecast based on current structural signals: 4.3 and declining. In the Hansen Fit Score™, scores above 6.0 indicate strong practitioner alignment; scores below 5.0 signal increasing implementation friction and structural risk.
The Technical score has moved in the opposite direction — higher with each capital event, as acquisitions added capability. Cirtuo added readiness assessment. Scoutbee added supplier intelligence. The platform can do more things than it could in 2006. The question is whether the people responsible for making it work inside client organizations experience it as a system that adapts to them — or one that requires them to adapt to it.
Millie at Geosyntec Consultants answered that question without knowing she was answering it. An AdaptOne client who migrated to Coupa as transaction volumes grew, she described the experience plainly: “We’ve gone to one of those — cookie cutter, this is what you get. Which is very difficult.”
The founders left Oracle because Oracle’s architecture required practitioners to adapt to the system — and they had watched that failure mechanism operate at close range long enough to name it precisely. Seventeen years later, a practitioner used those exact words to describe what Coupa had become.
The noble intention survived the founding years. It did not survive the capital structure that followed.
By 2013 I had noted in this archive that “it wasn’t that long ago that Coupa used to applaud my articles for the veracity of my research and the perspectives that I delivered regarding their growing presence in the market.” The cooling of that relationship tracked precisely with the point at which my independent documentation and Coupa’s preferred narrative began to diverge. The platform was changing. The archive was recording it.
The SAP Ariba-ORO Story: The Same Noble Origin
Sudhir Bhojwani spent nine years at Ariba — the original practitioner-aligned platform that did not survive the SAP acquisition intact. Lalitha Rajagopalan and Yuan Tung worked alongside him. All three watched the same pattern play out that Stephens and Eisner had watched at Oracle: an equation-based architecture reasserting itself over a platform that had been built to escape it, Wall Street performance becoming the primary signal, practitioner outcomes becoming secondary.
This archive was documenting that divergence in real time. In August 2007 — three years before the SAP acquisition — I had already published “The Ariba Interviews: Re-engineering the Future of On-Demand,” identifying the Wall Street versus practitioner tension in Ariba’s own communications. By November 2010 the post was titled “Is Ariba More Focused on Wall Street versus Their Chosen Market?” — documenting a specific failed implementation worth $20 million that appeared nowhere in the analyst reports maintaining Buy ratings on the stock.
Bhojwani, Rajagopalan, and Tung lived inside that divergence. When they left in 2020 to found ORO Labs, they named the failure they were correcting with the same precision that the Coupa founders had applied to Oracle fourteen years earlier. Existing procurement software, Bhojwani said, is “designed as systems of record, rather than systems of action.”
Systems of record versus systems of action. That is the behavioral alignment failure — the identical diagnosis, one generation later, applied to a different incumbent.
The early ORO platform reflected it faithfully. Transaction-based pricing rather than seat licensing — a structural signal that the platform’s economics align with client outcomes rather than client headcount. No-code adaptability. Founder-led with deep practitioner roots. Named enterprise clients across regulated industries: Coca-Cola, Roche, Novartis, Bayer, Siemens Energy, Booking.com. A 150% revenue retention rate indicating that existing clients are expanding their use of the platform rather than reducing it.
The noble intention was producing real practitioner outcomes. Again.
Will We Be Viewing a Similar Graph?
This week, ORO Labs announced a $100 million Series C led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity and Brighton Park Capital — a growth equity firm with PE characteristics. Total capital raised now stands at $160 million. Revenue tripling is expected again, on the record. Goldman Sachs and Brighton Park have joined the board with the return expectations that board seats at that level carry. And in March 2025, ORO acquired ProcureTech — the analyst and media property that would otherwise cover them independently.
The question the divergence graphic in this series already answers for Coupa is now the right question to ask about ORO: will we, five years from now, be looking at an ORO arc that mirrors what happened to Coupa after its own capital inflection?
The honest answer is: the structural conditions that produced Coupa’s arc are now present at ORO.
That does not mean ORO will follow the identical trajectory. Founding teams matter. Culture matters. The transaction-based pricing model is structurally more resistant to the worst forms of behavioral alignment erosion than seat-based licensing was at Coupa. There are meaningful differences between Brighton Park Capital and Thoma Bravo in terms of sector focus and portfolio approach.
But Goldman Sachs Growth Equity and Brighton Park did not invest $100 million in ORO to preserve its current operating model. They invested to generate a return on a timeline. That return requires revenue multiples that demand growth at a pace that has, without exception across this series, produced the same outcome: Technical scores rising, Behavioral Alignment scores falling, HFS™ composite declining.
The founders of ORO know this. They watched it happen to the platform they left. The founders of Coupa knew it too — they had watched it happen at Oracle. Knowing the pattern and escaping the capital forces that produce it are different things.
What Phase 0™ Provides That the Market Does Not
The Coupa founders’ intention was noble. The ORO founders’ intention is noble. The practitioners who signed Coupa contracts in 2019 based on a platform scoring 6.8 were not wrong to sign them. The practitioners signing ORO contracts today based on a platform whose current behavioral alignment signals are genuinely strong are not wrong to sign them either.
What they are missing — what Millie at Geosyntec was missing when she signed with Coupa — is a documented baseline at the moment of maximum behavioral alignment, contractual protections built around the commitments driving the decision, and a defined threshold for re-evaluation before losses compound.
Phase 0™ provides all three. Not by predicting whether ORO will follow Coupa’s arc — no framework can do that with certainty. But by ensuring that the practitioner engages with the platform on their terms, at the moment when the vendor has every incentive to honor behavioral commitments, before the capital structure makes those commitments harder to sustain.
The noble intention that drove both founding teams is real and worth engaging with. It is also not a sufficient protection against what happens when capital arrives with different expectations.
While practitioners can’t control the ProcureTech market, they can control their engagement with it.
That is what Phase 0™ exists to determine. Before the contract is signed. Before the arc becomes visible. At the moment when the outcome can still be shaped.
This is the fifth post in a series examining the structural forces shaping ProcureTech implementation outcomes. The divergence graphic comparing the AdaptOne and Coupa HFS™ arcs from 2006 to 2026 is available in the previous post in this series. The Procurement Insights archive — 3,300+ published documents spanning eighteen years — is available at procureinsights.com. The Hansen Fit Score™ and Phase 0™ organizational readiness diagnostic are proprietary frameworks of Hansen Models™.
Jon W. Hansen is the founder of Hansen Models™ and creator of the Hansen Fit Score™, the Hansen Method™, and the RAM 2025™ multimodel validation framework. Procurement Insights has been publishing independently since 2007 — no vendor sponsorships, no referral arrangements.
Visit the Hansen Model’s website for additional resources.
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Procurement Insights
Noble Intentions, Capital Realities: The Oracle-Coupa and SAP Ariba-ORO Story
Posted on March 14, 2026
0
By Jon W. Hansen | Procurement Insights
There is something genuinely admirable about what both Coupa and ORO Labs set out to do.
Two founding teams. Two generations apart. Both walked away from dominant, well-resourced employers — Oracle and SAP Ariba respectively — not because they had to, but because they believed they could do something better for the practitioners their employers were failing. That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the most honest diagnosis of what is wrong with enterprise procurement technology: the people closest to the failure understood it best, and they left to fix it.
The question this post asks is not whether those intentions were genuine. They were. The question is what happens to genuine intentions when capital finds them — and whether the ORO arc is already beginning to mirror the Coupa arc this archive has been documenting since 2008.
The Oracle-Coupa Story: Noble Origins
Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner built Oracle’s iProcure product line. They were instrumental in establishing what Oracle positioned as its procurement future — and they watched it fail practitioners repeatedly, for the same structural reason every time. Oracle’s architecture demanded that practitioners adapt to the system. The system did not adapt to practitioners. User resistance was treated as a training and change management problem rather than a design failure. Implementation success rates told the real story, but the industry had learned to stop measuring them because the numbers were too damaging to discuss.
When Stephens and Eisner left Oracle in 2006 to found Coupa, they named the problem explicitly: the company existed to tackle “the problem at the root of most e-procurement failures — employee noncompliance.”
That is a precise behavioral diagnosis from people who had seen the failure mechanism operate at close range. Coupa’s early platform reflected it — affordable, accessible, designed to be adopted rather than implemented, built around how practitioners actually worked rather than how Oracle’s architecture required them to work.
I began covering Coupa in September 2008 — before any major analyst firm had placed them on a quadrant or a wave. My assessment was straightforward: this platform represented what the market had been promising for years and failing to deliver. In 2009 I wrote what is likely the industry’s first formal independent white paper on Coupa Software. The title captured what I saw: “Redefining Procurement: How Coupa has Bridged the Gap Between What is Known and What is Possible.”
By 2011, Coupa invited me to write a five-part series for their own Coupa Cabana blog. Part one generated 2,523 impressions against their normal average of 500. The platform was doing what its founders had set out to do. The noble intention was producing real practitioner outcomes.
Did Coupa Succeed After PE Funding?
The honest answer is: it depends on how you define success — and for whom.
By the market’s conventional measures, Coupa succeeded extraordinarily. IPO in 2016. $169 million raised in the private markets before going public. Approximately $1.21 billion in annual recurring revenue by 2025. Acquisition by Thoma Bravo at $8 billion in February 2023. Its first GAAP profitable year came in 2025 — seventeen years after founding. By investor and capital market standards, that is an unambiguous success story.
By the practitioner’s measure — which is the measure Stephens and Eisner built the company to satisfy — the story is more complicated.
The Hansen Fit Score™ applied longitudinally across Coupa’s five ownership phases tells it numerically. At founding in 2006: 6.3. At the pre-IPO growth peak: 6.8. At the public company peak in 2022: 5.0. Post-Thoma Bravo in 2023: 4.6. Forward forecast based on current structural signals: 4.3 and declining. In the Hansen Fit Score™, scores above 6.0 indicate strong practitioner alignment; scores below 5.0 signal increasing implementation friction and structural risk.
The Technical score has moved in the opposite direction — higher with each capital event, as acquisitions added capability. Cirtuo added readiness assessment. Scoutbee added supplier intelligence. The platform can do more things than it could in 2006. The question is whether the people responsible for making it work inside client organizations experience it as a system that adapts to them — or one that requires them to adapt to it.
Millie at Geosyntec Consultants answered that question without knowing she was answering it. An AdaptOne client who migrated to Coupa as transaction volumes grew, she described the experience plainly: “We’ve gone to one of those — cookie cutter, this is what you get. Which is very difficult.”
The founders left Oracle because Oracle’s architecture required practitioners to adapt to the system — and they had watched that failure mechanism operate at close range long enough to name it precisely. Seventeen years later, a practitioner used those exact words to describe what Coupa had become.
The noble intention survived the founding years. It did not survive the capital structure that followed.
By 2013 I had noted in this archive that “it wasn’t that long ago that Coupa used to applaud my articles for the veracity of my research and the perspectives that I delivered regarding their growing presence in the market.” The cooling of that relationship tracked precisely with the point at which my independent documentation and Coupa’s preferred narrative began to diverge. The platform was changing. The archive was recording it.
The SAP Ariba-ORO Story: The Same Noble Origin
Sudhir Bhojwani spent nine years at Ariba — the original practitioner-aligned platform that did not survive the SAP acquisition intact. Lalitha Rajagopalan and Yuan Tung worked alongside him. All three watched the same pattern play out that Stephens and Eisner had watched at Oracle: an equation-based architecture reasserting itself over a platform that had been built to escape it, Wall Street performance becoming the primary signal, practitioner outcomes becoming secondary.
This archive was documenting that divergence in real time. In August 2007 — three years before the SAP acquisition — I had already published “The Ariba Interviews: Re-engineering the Future of On-Demand,” identifying the Wall Street versus practitioner tension in Ariba’s own communications. By November 2010 the post was titled “Is Ariba More Focused on Wall Street versus Their Chosen Market?” — documenting a specific failed implementation worth $20 million that appeared nowhere in the analyst reports maintaining Buy ratings on the stock.
Bhojwani, Rajagopalan, and Tung lived inside that divergence. When they left in 2020 to found ORO Labs, they named the failure they were correcting with the same precision that the Coupa founders had applied to Oracle fourteen years earlier. Existing procurement software, Bhojwani said, is “designed as systems of record, rather than systems of action.”
Systems of record versus systems of action. That is the behavioral alignment failure — the identical diagnosis, one generation later, applied to a different incumbent.
The early ORO platform reflected it faithfully. Transaction-based pricing rather than seat licensing — a structural signal that the platform’s economics align with client outcomes rather than client headcount. No-code adaptability. Founder-led with deep practitioner roots. Named enterprise clients across regulated industries: Coca-Cola, Roche, Novartis, Bayer, Siemens Energy, Booking.com. A 150% revenue retention rate indicating that existing clients are expanding their use of the platform rather than reducing it.
The noble intention was producing real practitioner outcomes. Again.
Will We Be Viewing a Similar Graph?
This week, ORO Labs announced a $100 million Series C led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity and Brighton Park Capital — a growth equity firm with PE characteristics. Total capital raised now stands at $160 million. Revenue tripling is expected again, on the record. Goldman Sachs and Brighton Park have joined the board with the return expectations that board seats at that level carry. And in March 2025, ORO acquired ProcureTech — the analyst and media property that would otherwise cover them independently.
The question the divergence graphic in this series already answers for Coupa is now the right question to ask about ORO: will we, five years from now, be looking at an ORO arc that mirrors what happened to Coupa after its own capital inflection?
The honest answer is: the structural conditions that produced Coupa’s arc are now present at ORO.
That does not mean ORO will follow the identical trajectory. Founding teams matter. Culture matters. The transaction-based pricing model is structurally more resistant to the worst forms of behavioral alignment erosion than seat-based licensing was at Coupa. There are meaningful differences between Brighton Park Capital and Thoma Bravo in terms of sector focus and portfolio approach.
But Goldman Sachs Growth Equity and Brighton Park did not invest $100 million in ORO to preserve its current operating model. They invested to generate a return on a timeline. That return requires revenue multiples that demand growth at a pace that has, without exception across this series, produced the same outcome: Technical scores rising, Behavioral Alignment scores falling, HFS™ composite declining.
The founders of ORO know this. They watched it happen to the platform they left. The founders of Coupa knew it too — they had watched it happen at Oracle. Knowing the pattern and escaping the capital forces that produce it are different things.
What Phase 0™ Provides That the Market Does Not
The Coupa founders’ intention was noble. The ORO founders’ intention is noble. The practitioners who signed Coupa contracts in 2019 based on a platform scoring 6.8 were not wrong to sign them. The practitioners signing ORO contracts today based on a platform whose current behavioral alignment signals are genuinely strong are not wrong to sign them either.
What they are missing — what Millie at Geosyntec was missing when she signed with Coupa — is a documented baseline at the moment of maximum behavioral alignment, contractual protections built around the commitments driving the decision, and a defined threshold for re-evaluation before losses compound.
Phase 0™ provides all three. Not by predicting whether ORO will follow Coupa’s arc — no framework can do that with certainty. But by ensuring that the practitioner engages with the platform on their terms, at the moment when the vendor has every incentive to honor behavioral commitments, before the capital structure makes those commitments harder to sustain.
The noble intention that drove both founding teams is real and worth engaging with. It is also not a sufficient protection against what happens when capital arrives with different expectations.
While practitioners can’t control the ProcureTech market, they can control their engagement with it.
That is what Phase 0™ exists to determine. Before the contract is signed. Before the arc becomes visible. At the moment when the outcome can still be shaped.
This is the fifth post in a series examining the structural forces shaping ProcureTech implementation outcomes. The divergence graphic comparing the AdaptOne and Coupa HFS™ arcs from 2006 to 2026 is available in the previous post in this series. The Procurement Insights archive — 3,300+ published documents spanning eighteen years — is available at procureinsights.com. The Hansen Fit Score™ and Phase 0™ organizational readiness diagnostic are proprietary frameworks of Hansen Models™.
Jon W. Hansen is the founder of Hansen Models™ and creator of the Hansen Fit Score™, the Hansen Method™, and the RAM 2025™ multimodel validation framework. Procurement Insights has been publishing independently since 2007 — no vendor sponsorships, no referral arrangements.
Visit the Hansen Model’s website for additional resources.
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