ICYMI Pulsecheck (June 15 – 20, 2025)

Hot off the press:

📈 Salesforce slips in a 6% price hike, blames AI glitter.
Starting Aug 1, Sales, Service, and other core clouds go up 6% for Enterprise & Unlimited plans. Reason? “AI everywhere.” Time to dust off those multi-year discount clauses.
👉 salesforce.com

🧠 JAGGAER lands the first ethical AI stamp of approval.
They just bagged the world’s first ISO/IEC 42001 cert—basically the Michelin star for AI governance in Source-to-Pay. If AI compliance matters to your vendor reviews, this one’s a flex.
👉 jaggaer.com

🛡️ Certificial drops a Vendor-Management Partner Program.
Insurtech meets procurement: the new network ties brokers, carriers, and buyers into one proof-of-insurance platform. Faster onboarding, fewer compliance fires.
👉 fintech.global

🏆 Oracle wins big across 5 Gartner Magic Quadrants.
Fusion Cloud now claims “Leader” in planning through procurement. Expect your next Oracle pitch to sound like: “Why not just use one platform for everything?”
👉 oracle.com

⚖️ UN drops a human-rights checklist for AI procurement.
New guidance says public and private buyers must bake transparency + bias testing into their RFPs. That gen-AI deal? Time to loop in legal before you hit sign.
👉 reliefweb.int

Ramp raises $200M Series E at a $16B valuation
The AI-powered finance & spend stack (cards → procurement → bill pay)

With $80B+ in payment volume and 40K+ customers, Ramp’s burn-blitz move signals heavier automation and tighter lock-ins.

The war chest bankrolls deeper workflow automation and tougher renewal questions for legacy expense tools.

Payabli scores $28M Series B

Building embeddable payments + spend rails for vertical SaaS platforms. The land-grab to own both revenue and vendor outflows in a single ledger is on.

Mercanis lands €17.3M Series A
Berlin-based “Agentic-AI” sourcing engine that writes the RFPs for you. Europe today, copycat U.S. challengers tomorrow. Procurement leaders who think RFPs are broken ,this could be your blueprint.

Nvelop raises €1.2M Seed
Autonomous procurement for SMBs. Their pitch? “AI buyers that don’t need headcount.” Proof that the ChatGPT-for-spend trend is crawling downmarket.

Platform Moves

Coupa ↔ Sprout Social
Sprout dumped spreadsheet triage and plugged Coupa’s AI-native total-spend suite into its ERP, killing manual entry and surfacing anomalous invoices in real time. Translation: fewer “who bought this?” Slacks and a clearer path from requisition to close. If your org still reconciles PO PDFs on Fridays, the benchmark just moved.

Price-Hike Radar

Microsoft is hiking prices—again
+10% on all on-prem server products and +15-20% on Core & Enterprise CALs, hitting July 1 and August 1.
💡 If you're mid-renewal, lock multi-year terms now or brace for sticker shock.

VMware, Docker, Microsoft… the “AI tax” is real
Licenseware’s June update shows:

• VMware licensing jumped up to 1,000%

• Docker’s up 67–80%

• Microsoft Teams Phone is now 25% pricier

💡 Plan for 10–15% annual SaaS inflation in 2026 budgets or suffer during QBRs.

📊 Metric of the Week