Matt Garippa

A friend owned a CrossFit gym, and the friend was miserable. Not about the burpees. About the boxes. Coordinating shipments, chasing payments, waiting on fitness machinery that hadn't shown up, all of it eating the hours he wanted to spend coaching. Matt Garippa and his brother Zach listened to the complaint and heard something most people would have nodded past: a business problem hiding inside a logistics annoyance. That gym became the first use case for what is now Order.co - procurement tools built for people who have never used the word "procurement" in a sentence.

Today Matt Garippa is the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Order.co, the New York company that quietly handles the unglamorous middle of running a business: deciding what to buy, buying it, paying for it, and proving later that you did. Hundreds of finance, operations, and procurement teams run on it - including names like WeWork and SoulCycle. Matt owns the business side: strategy, partnerships, and the analytics layer that turns a pile of purchase orders into something a CFO can actually use.

What makes the seat unusual is who's sitting in it. Most people who build purchasing software come up through operations or supply chain. Matt came up through trading floors.

From the trading desk to the warehouse dock

Before any of this, Matt priced risk. He worked the fixed income and foreign exchange side of institutional finance, with stops that read like a tour of the industry - JPMorgan Chase, Barclays Capital, and Citadel among them. It's a world where a basis point matters and where the difference between a good day and a bad one is whether your model saw something the market didn't.

That instinct - find the inefficiency, price it, exploit it - turns out to map cleanly onto procurement. A company buying the same printer paper from three vendors at three prices is, in trading terms, an arbitrage waiting to be closed. Order.co's pitch leans on "predictive applications and embedded fintech," which is a polished way of describing the thing Matt did on a desk for years: use data to make a smarter purchase than the person across the table.

He didn't leave the analytics behind, either. Matt holds a Master of Science in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern and a degree in Finance, Marketing, and Mathematics from NYU's Stern School. He has also taught the subject, connected to Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business. Running a startup and grading homework is an odd combination. Matt apparently does both.

Why a company called Negotiatus changed its name

For its first six years the company was called Negotiatus. The name was meant to signal mutual wins through negotiation, which is a nice idea and a terrible word. The founders eventually admitted the obvious: nobody could pronounce it, and fewer could spell it. In 2022 they rebranded to Order.co - a name that does double duty, meaning both the thing you place and the calm you feel when chaos finally lines up.

The rename rode in on money. The same announcement carried a $30 million Series B led by Stage 2 Capital, funded through a direct investment from MIT's endowment - a fund north of $30 billion that does not write checks casually. Reported total funding sits around $82 million. The cap table picked up names like Clocktower Ventures and Collaborative Fund, and Mark Hawkins, the former president and CFO emeritus at Salesforce, came on as an advisor.

The plumbing nobody sees

Scale broke the early version of the product in a specific, instructive way. As Order pushed toward thousands of card requests a day, the team's original method - having a partner manually generate virtual card credentials one at a time - simply stopped scaling. A mutual investor pointed them to Lithic's card-issuing API. Matt liked it for the reason a former trader would: it was API-first, developer-friendly, and gave him data. After integrating it in 2019, the company crossed $100 million in gross merchandise value in 2021, double the year before, with payments traceable all the way back to the original purchase order.

This is the part of the work that never trends. Vendors like Staples getting paid faster is not a headline. But it is the difference between software that demos well and software a finance team will actually let near its money.

The next bet: AI built in, not bolted on

Matt's current argument is that AI is about to become a competitive advantage in procurement, and that the advantage should live inside the platform rather than as a feature you toggle on later. In 2025 he announced Order.co's AI capabilities with a number attached: partners using them, he said, have seen 5-10x hard-dollar savings. The framing is pure Matt - not a promise about the future, a measurement from the present.

It's a fitting place for a former trader to land. He spent the first half of his career finding edges in markets that moved by the second. He's spending the second half finding them in invoices, vendor lists, and the quiet machinery of how companies spend money. Less glamorous. Arguably more useful. Either way, someone finally made sure the gym never runs out of dumbbells.