It is Monday morning at a Fortune 500 buyer's desk. Twenty years ago this person would be staring at a 90-page RFP template, a row of stale spreadsheets, and the steady drumbeat of consultants offering to help. Today they open a chat window and type one sentence: I need a translation vendor in three regions. Within minutes, a piece of software named Glo has scoped the project, run it past a marketplace of vetted suppliers, summarized the proposals, drawn the price comparisons, and quietly enforced the company's procurement policy. The buyer hasn't opened Excel.
That software was built in Palo Alto by a company called Globality. It is not a household name. It does not want to be. Its customers are the kind of organizations that move trillions of dollars in supplier spend each year and don't enjoy talking about it - Fidelity, Santander, BT, Tesco, IQVIA, T. Rowe Price, Invesco, HP. Procurement is a fluorescent-lit corner of the enterprise that the world tends to ignore until something breaks. Globality is one of the small handful of companies betting that AI is the thing that will finally make it interesting.
The problem they saw
Enterprise sourcing is one of those processes that is broken in ways large enough to be invisible. A typical Fortune 500 runs thousands of sourcing projects a year, most of them small and medium-sized buys that nobody has the time to optimize. The big ones get the attention of strategic procurement teams. The rest - the "tail spend" in industry jargon - leak budget. The number you hear most often is that companies overpay by 10 to 20 percent on this kind of work, simply because nobody is watching.
The traditional fix was to hire more procurement people, or to outsource to consultancies that hire procurement people on your behalf. Globality's bet was that this looked, in hindsight, a lot like building bigger call centers in the year before chatbots arrived.
Caption: The phrase "tail spend" is procurement's gentle way of admitting nobody knows where the money went.
The founders' bet
Joel Hyatt is not the obvious person to be running an AI startup. He spent the 1980s building Hyatt Legal Services, the storefront law firm chain that MetLife eventually acquired. He spent the 2000s co-founding Current TV with Al Gore - the cable channel that ran user-generated short-form video before YouTube made the format inescapable, and which Al Jazeera bought in 2013. In 2015 he started Globality with co-founder Lior Delgo, on the theory that the playbook he had run twice before - take a service that is locked up behind a guild of professionals, then open it up with technology - would work on the procurement function too.
It was an early call. ChatGPT was years away. Generative AI in the enterprise was a slide-deck word. The first version of Globality was less a product and more a thesis: that the work procurement does - scoping projects, finding suppliers, comparing proposals, negotiating terms - could be encoded, learned, and eventually run by software. Investors agreed. The company has now raised roughly $357 million across its rounds, the most recent a $47 million Series D-1/D-2 in October 2024 led by Rollins Capital.
The product, in plain English
Globality's platform centers on Glo, the AI agent that does the work a junior procurement analyst used to do, only faster and at 3am. A user describes what they need to buy. Glo conducts a structured interview to fill in the requirements, generates a scope document, sources matching suppliers from the company's preferred panel or a wider marketplace, ingests the resulting proposals, builds the price comparisons, flags risk and compliance issues, and supports - or in some cases runs - the negotiation.
The thing that distinguishes Glo from a generic LLM bolted onto a procurement portal is that it has been trained, with human procurement experts, across more than 9,000 spend categories. The agent knows what a reasonable price band looks like for translation services in Brazil. It knows the questions you should ask a marketing-agency RFP that you shouldn't ask a logistics RFP. This is the unsexy work that makes the difference between a demo and a deployment.
What Glo actually does
- Scopes sourcing projects via natural-language interviews.
- Matches buyers to merit-based suppliers from a dynamic marketplace.
- Analyzes proposals - pricing, terms, risk - and surfaces insights.
- Negotiates multi-round deals and enforces internal policy.
- Reports back with charts, comparisons, and exportable summaries.