Enable.

Walk into the back office of any large distributor and you will find a spreadsheet. It is enormous. It has been emailed around for years. It is, somehow, the source of truth for tens of millions of dollars in rebate income. Enable's entire business is built on the bet that this spreadsheet has to die.

01 - Who they are nowThe rebate company

In May 2026, Enable is a 650-person software company headquartered on Mission Street in San Francisco, with offices in Stratford-upon-Avon, Toronto, Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland. It is a unicorn. It manages more than $2 trillion in trading programs. And most people who hear the pitch ask the same first question, which is some variation of "wait, that's a business?"

It is. A very large one. Rebates - the discounts manufacturers and distributors pay each other after the fact, based on volume, mix, timing or a hundred other variables - are how the goods-for-resale economy actually gets priced. They are also, until very recently, run almost entirely in Excel. Enable's elevator pitch for the better part of a decade was, roughly, "we are the thing that replaces the spreadsheet." The pitch worked.

02 - The problemA trillion-dollar Excel file

The problem Andrew Butt saw - and the reason Enable exists - is not glamorous. It is that the way most companies track rebate programs is broken in a specific and expensive way. A distributor might have thousands of supplier rebate deals running at once, each with its own tiers, product exclusions, time windows and claims rules. The data lives in PDFs and emails. The accruals live in a finance spreadsheet a senior accountant inherited from her predecessor. The trading partner has a different copy of the same numbers. Both versions are wrong, in different directions.

The result is money left on the table - sometimes a lot of it. It is also relationships that quietly sour, because two companies that depend on each other end up arguing about whose figure is right. Butt's argument was that this was not really a finance problem. It was a software problem that finance had been forced to solve with the wrong tool.

03 - The founders' betTwo teenagers, three companies

Andrew Butt and Denys Shortt OBE met at 16, in Warwickshire, which is the sort of detail that sounds like marketing until you find out they actually built three companies together. The first was DCS, a software business Shortt founded that gave Butt his first job. The second was Enable Informatix, a property-management SaaS they spun out and sold to Sovereign Capital in 2010. The third was this one.

They incorporated Enable in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2016, which is more famous for Shakespeare than for fintech, and which is the sort of place where most reasonable people would not start a venture-scale B2B software company. Butt and Shortt did it anyway, alongside co-founder David Hunt. By 2019 they had a working product. By 2023 they had a billion-dollar valuation. The path between those two sentences contained considerably more spreadsheets than this profile has room for.

04 - The productWhat it actually does

Enable's platform is, at its core, a shared workspace where two trading partners can model, agree on, execute and reconcile a rebate program without leaving the app. You can plug in pretty much any deal shape - product-specific, location-specific, tiered, lump-sum, time-bound, you name it - and the system will track it against live transactional data, accrue what is owed, generate the claim, and let the other side approve or dispute it in the same view.

Underneath sits an integration layer that talks to SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce CPQ and most of the ERPs you would expect a 50,000-SKU distributor to be running. On top sits a layer of analytics and forecasting that Enable is steadily filling with AI - claim reconciliation that used to take a week now takes minutes, and pricing teams can simulate the margin impact of a deal before they sign it. None of this sounds revolutionary in 2026. Until you remember that the alternative, in most companies, is still Excel.

Five things you can actually do with it

Run supplier and customer rebates side by side. Negotiate special pricing agreements with audit trails. Forecast accruals and chase claims automatically. Push reconciled figures back into your ERP. Argue less with your trading partner, which is the feature finance teams actually pay for.

05 - The proofSysco, GameStop and the long tail

Enable's customer list is unusually broad for an enterprise SaaS company at its stage. There are food-service giants like Sysco. There are car-parts incumbents like NAPA. There is GameStop, which most people associate with meme stocks but which is, in its day job, a retailer that runs an enormous number of supplier promotions. There is Chadwell Supply in property maintenance, K-Flex in industrial insulation, Rubix in engineering distribution. None of these companies are in the same industry. All of them, it turns out, run rebates.

06 - The missionTrade, with confidence

The official mission is, in Enable's own words, to give every customer the clarity to trade with confidence. The unofficial version is more useful. Butt has said in interviews that he wants Enable to be the layer that lets trading partners trust each other again - which is a much bigger and more sentimental claim than the surface category of "rebate software" would suggest. The argument is that pricing and rebates are where business relationships go to break, and if you fix that layer you fix something larger about how supply chains behave.

Whether or not you buy the sentimental version, the company's three values - "We Stay Curious," "We Care About the Details," "We Succeed Together" - read as the values of an organization that has decided detail-work is not a chore but the point. Which, for a product that has to reconcile thousands of line items against custom contractual terms, may be the only viable culture.

07 - Why it matters tomorrowAI eats the spreadsheet

The interesting part of Enable's next chapter is not really the funding. It is what happens when you put a large language model next to a decade of structured rebate data. Claim reconciliation - historically the kind of work a finance team did on a Friday afternoon with a Diet Coke and a sigh - becomes something a model does in the background. Deal optimization stops being a one-shot negotiation and becomes a continuous simulation. The interesting question is whether Enable, having spent ten years digitizing the data, ends up being the only company in this category that has the right shape of training set.

Competitors exist - Vistex, Model N, Flintfox, the SAP add-ons - and they are not standing still. But none of them entered the market with software-as-the-default-assumption the way Enable did. The category, for now, is Enable's to lose. The market will tell us, soon enough, whether they do.