Zip Forward: Q&A with Rujul Zaparde, CEO and Co-Founder, Zip

Zip Forward Europe saw procurement leaders join together in London for a one-day summit exploring how senior leaders are using procurement to drive exceptional business value. 

Throughout the day, attendees were treated to roundtables, workshops and keynotes from a range of speakers, including Nicole Sherwin, Chief Impact Officer at EcoVadis, alongside procurement leaders from Invesco, Metro Bank and Just Eat.

At the morning’s opening keynote Zip for Risk Orchestration was announced. The new suite of tools are set to bring Zip's proven orchestration capabilities to supplier risk management.

Following the announcement, Procurement Magazine sat down with Rujul Zaparde, the company’s CEO and Co-Founder to discuss more about the tool and how Zip expansion in Europe is going.

Tell us a bit about how you and Zip have evolved since we last spoke?

It's been really incredible just to see the growth over the last year, especially in Europe.

We've doubled the number of customers that we have and the size of the team has grown by five times and in 2024 we opened our first London office. It's just been amazing to see the growth and momentum and I think a lot of the tailwind behind that momentum is actually the focus on risk in EMEA with new regulations.

You've just announced Risk Orchestration, why was this something Zip wanted to bring to its users?

Our European customers really actually pulled this to start from us because we would see customers take Zip and start to build more risk related workflow. We at Zip double clicked on this and realised that there's a real opportunity to help our customers, because of the new regulations.

So much of procurement's role today is about managing risk, not just spend, maybe even more risk than spend now. We want to make sure we're supporting and empowering our customers and championing them to be able to really drive compliance in their organisations without impacting efficiency at all.

You've started to expand into Europe, what has Zip learned from this expansion?

I've noticed that the problem and the opportunity of intake and procurement orchestration is just truly so horizontal and global.

Whatever the nature of your organisation, whatever it is that you do, whatever it's that you procure, procurement orchestration is there to help you and will actually solve real pain points. 

I see organisations in all sectors, in all industries, care more today about risk and management of risk than ever before. More and more, it is the procurement team who are mandated to solve the risk and compliance issue, in every industry out there.  

What does Zip hope to achieve from today's event?

It is just so awesome to bring together such a great group of procurement leaders and just forward thinking folks.

I really think that the people that embrace risk orchestration, procurement orchestration, AI and automation in the world, are going to be the ones that define their own industries and they'll be at the organisations that are leading. It's so awesome to bring people like this together. 

Why should companies join Zip in the era of enterprise AI?

I think that we are actually right there dead centre at the forefront and it's because we invest, we are a product and engineering led company.

We hire and bring on board the best consumer and AI engineers in the world. All the leading AI companies all run on Zip, like Open AI. We're really focused on building the best possible product that's actually tangible and that people actually use for AI and procurement orchestration. We couldn't be more excited. 

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