Spendesk acquires Okko to fully integrate procurement and spend management

News

Spendesk acquires Okko to fully integrate procurement and spend management

2024-04-09 21:12 Last Updated At：21:30

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 9, 2024--

Spendesk, the complete spend management platform, today announces its acquisition of French procurement company Okko. By integrating the technology and resources of Okko, Spendesk becomes the first European solution to fully integrate procurement and spend management for mid-sized businesses.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240409402493/en/

Okko’s procurement platform helps businesses to digitise the procurement process. From the initial need to the final purchase order, Okko’s user-friendly approach provides the complete workflow including capabilities like vendor management, collaborative purchase requests and contract renewal management. The resulting 'intake-to-procure-to-pay’ solution enables finance teams, legal teams, IT departments and more to benefit from a collaborative, automated and frictionless process to fully control spend even before it happens.

With a shared vision of putting employees at the heart of their tools, the acquisition of Okko represents an important development in Spendesk's strategy to integrate robust, streamlined procurement services and broaden its scope to provide solutions that meet the more complex needs of larger companies.

Rodolphe Ardant, co-founder and CEO of Spendesk, said: "Spendesk has consistently been at the forefront of innovation in the spend management space. The acquisition of Okko reflects Spendesk's dedication to staying ahead of the curve and our ambition to liberate every part of our clients' business with smarter, agile spending solutions.

"While finance teams already use spend management features such as payment methods and budget controls for purchase orders, the procurement process is more laborious. Poor workflows and tools lead to a lack of visibility, additional workloads, and cost control difficulties for all teams involved. Now, we can help clients to increase the efficiency of these complex processes," Ardant continued.

Julien Chriqui, co-founder and CEO of Okko, said: "Okko's mission revolves around putting employees and a collaborative approach at the heart of the procurement process to help companies decrease risk, control spend, and save precious time. The union of Okko with Spendesk brings together two dynamic teams, both with a shared commitment to client success. Spendesk’s clients can now access an even broader range of features as they seek to streamline their spend management processes."

Aurore Teboul, Indirect Procurement Buyer at PayFit, adds: "We're very pleased to see Okko join Spendesk! For PayFit, a long-standing user of both solutions, this acquisition is synonymous with the mutualization of purchasing and expense management. Okko has particularly helped us to coordinate our stakeholders across legal, finance, and compliance, and to improve our communication. It reinforces the visibility given by Spendesk in terms of expense tracking, and ensures that no deadline is missed, as all of our suppliers are now centralised on the same platform."

About Spendesk

Spendesk is the complete spend management platform that saves businesses with 50 to 1000 employees time and money by connecting company spend. With the integration of everyday technologies, built-in automation, and an easily adopted approval process, Spendesk’s single solution makes agile, efficient spending easy for employees and gives finance leaders complete visibility across entire company spend. Trusted by thousands of businesses from start-ups to established brands, and with offices in Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid, Spendesk puts community at the heart of spend management. Spendesk-backed CFO Connect is the fastest-growing global community of finance leaders with more than 12,000 members. For more information, visit: https://www.spendesk.com/en/press/

About Okko

Okko was co-founded by Julien Chriqui (CEO) and Robin Brissaud (CTO) within the startup studio Hexa. Okko is a SaaS that helps companies better orchestrate their procurement process and simplify vendor onboarding. Okko’s specificity is that it puts employees at the heart of the procurement process, thus helping companies decrease risk, control spend and save time. For more information, visit: https://www.getokko.app/

Met Gala guests take artistic liberties with dress code

Met Gala guests from Beyoncé to Naomi Osaka to Emma Chamberlain did not play it safe this year for the Met Gala, delivering custom works of art in honor of the dress code “Fashion is art.”

Beyoncé left the cowboy hat at home, dazzled in a custom Olivier Rousteing sculptural skeleton dress with a cream and dust blue feathered train fitted with a diamond crown for “Queen Bey." The award-winning performer and her family, Jay-Z and Blue, stopped to pose as a unit on the carpet together.

Osaka stunned as she left The Mark Hotel for the Gala in a dramatic Robert Wun white sculptural fitted dress with exaggerated shoulders and adorned with red feathers and a matching headpiece. To complete her dramatic look, Osaka’s hands were dipped in dripping red paint. A similar look by Wun sits inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibit, “Costume Art.”

On the Met steps, Osaka opened her dress and removed her headpiece for a grand reveal underneath. She wowed in a sleek red beaded gown embellished with the form of a body.

Chamberlain arrived in a breathtaking Mugler by Miguel Castro Freitas hand-painted dress. The star was dipped in a rainbow of colors from her décolletage down to the spiral train of her body-hugging dress with fringe falling down the cuffs of the long-sleeve gown.

With all the fanfare around the “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” Met Gala Co-chair Anna Wintour opted for a cool mint ensemble — not the trendy cerulean blue from the first film. Wintour’s look featured a feathered cape and a beaded dress by Matthieu Blazy for Chanel that she classically paired with her signature bob and oversized sunglasses.

Other co-chairs of the evening Nicole Kidman and Venus Williams chose more subdued looks. Williams wore a sparkling black off-the-shoulder gown with a dazzling bejeweled neckpiece in homage to a painting of herself done by Robert Pruitt for the National Portrait Gallery. Event sponsor Lauren Sánchez Bezos arrived in a form-fitting Schiaparelli gown, which she told Vogue was influenced by John Singer Sargent’s 1884 painting “Madame X.”

When guests were not wearing art, they were making references to it. Head of Editorial Content for US Vogue Chloe Malle wore an apricot orange Colleen Allen dress inspired by Sir Frederic Leighton’s “Flaming June” painting. Actor and author Lena Dunham collaborated with Valentino designer Alessandro Michele for her red feathered dress to depict his interpretation of “Judith Slaying Holofernes.” As a child, Dunham told Vogue, she would visit the Met museum on Sundays and admire the paintings in the renaissance section.

“One of my favorite painters from that era is Artemisia Gentileschi, who was one of the only women painting professionally in that moment,” she told Vogue. “So I sent some of the images to Alessandro, and because he’s a genius instead of dressing me like her, he said, ‘You are actually the blood spatter as ... Judith cuts the neck off a man.’”

Stars also celebrated the dress code with their accessories. Actor and fashion muse Gwendoline Christie playfully covered her face on the carpet with a mask of her own face while pop star Katy Perry opened and closed her fencing-like mask on the carpet to smile at the cameras.

Venus Williams was not the only guest to break the fourth wall with an artistic reference to herself. It was a trend of the night with gala host committee members Amy Sherald in Thom Browne donning a look inspired by her own work of art and pop star Sabrina Carpenter wearing a Dior dress designed with film strips from the 1954 movie “Sabrina.”

Some guests brought out their artistic side as they transformed their dresses into works of art. TikTok followers watched along as Jessica Kayll, who designs colorful silk robes, finished painting her dress in the days leading up to the gala. Kayll painted her own take on the famous Monet water lily scene right on top her dress for the gala.

While her “Devil Wears Prada 2” cast mates kept it classic in black, Anne Hathaway made a statement in her custom Michael Kors Grecian-inspired strapless dress, which was hand painted with a dove of peace.

“She is the goddess of peace,” Kors told Vogue.

Rather than wear art, models showed off their toned bodies as part of "Costume Art" exhibit's theme celebrating artistic representations of the body. Supermodels Gigi Hadid and Irina Shayk both wore revealing looks on the carpet.

Bad Bunny went full costume, carrying a cane and dressing up as an older version of himself with gray hair and costume makeup to give him wrinkles. The artist joked with Vogue that it took 53 years to finish the look. And supermodel Heidi Klum, known for taking her Halloween costume to new heights, brought that same dedication to the Met Gala as she arrived as a draped statue.

Kim Kardashian, known for her body-hugging fashion choices, wore a bright orange metallic body plate from the '60s designed by Allen Jones.

Unlike last year’s blue carpet, this year’s carpet appeared intentionally forgotten by time with grass creeping up the steps. The carpet featured patches of overgrown grass peeking out from the stone steps with manicured shrubs lining the side railing and white wisteria dangling from the roof. Potted purple flowers stood at the entrance of the carpet in large terra-cotta planters.

Past Gala dress codes have honored designers and pulled from literature. Last year, the art of tailoring was center stage with the dress code “Tailored for you.” The high-profile event raises money for the Met's Costume Institute, and each year the dress code for the gala takes cues from the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition.

On display this Spring, the “Costume Art” exhibit will “examine the centrality of the dressed body.”

The relationship between fashion and art has not always been embraced. Art historian and author Nancy Hall-Duncan writes in her book, “Art X Fashion: Fashion Inspired by Art” that in the 19th century, art was perceived as classical and fashion was frivolous.

When Yves Saint Laurent held the Met’s first fashion exhibit in 1983, the exhibit was met with heavy criticism. Since then, the museum has held countless fashion exhibits throughout the years with museums around the world following suit. The Louvre put on its first fashion exhibition “Louvre couture” last year.

The dress code set by Wintour and the Met's Costume Institute curator, Andrew Bolton, is the final seal of approval that fashion is art, Hall-Duncan told The Associated Press.

“Isn’t that a giant step?” she said. “It will indeed change perceptions.”

Didn't snag one of the pricey tickets or a spot on the ultra-exclusive guestlist?

The red carpet spectacle is available for all to watch online with the Vogue livestream. Ashley Graham, La La Anthony and Cara Delevingne will be hosting the livestream starting at 6 p.m. with Emma Chamberlain interviewing guests throughout the night.

The Associated Press will have a livestream of celebrities leaving a pair of New York hotels on their way to the gala beginning at 4:30 p.m. on APNews.com and YouTube. It's the first chance to see what attendees will be wearing before they hit the gala's carpet.