Vladimir Keel
6 Mar 2026UK’s £40M AI Lab, EightSleep’s $50M, Clay Founder Joins
Vladimir Keel (Leo): the $30M Raise & Why Procurement Is Broken
Leo co-founder and CEO Vladimir Keel joins roughly 20 minutes after the TechCrunch news broke, confirming the $30M Series A led by a16z with YC and angel Harry Stebbings on board. He explains procurement is one of the largest spend categories in any enterprise yet runs on unstructured communication — contracts, emails, quote comparisons, phone negotiations — which Leo's multi-agent system compresses from months into minutes. His co-founder lived the pain waiting seven months to procure an IT consultant, and Keel says the crystal-clear ROI drives unusually short one-to-two-month sales cycles into Fortune 500 and even Fortune 10 companies, with competition from China pressing the urgency.
Leo's US Expansion & the 'Agentified' Procurement Department
Keel says Leo is industry-agnostic, serving customers like Munich Re, retailers and manufacturers, and that the new capital funds US expansion from the New York office plus coverage of the end-to-end procurement workflow — P2P and source-to-contract — and more strategic tasks. He says enterprise buyers don't need educating on agents because their current 'solution' is manual labor, consultants and clunky e-procurement software; Leo's agents handle PR-to-PO flips and even prep negotiation scripts for Zoom calls. He predicts procurement teams will become 'agentified' departments managing AI agents and regaining internal visibility, and notes Leo itself keeps learning the pain by going through its customers' procurement processes.