The contract did exactly what it was supposed to do. It renewed. Somewhere inside a financial services company, a deadline passed, a clause took effect, and another opportunity to negotiate disappeared. According to a case study published by Valorant, unmanaged renewals were costing the business more than $15 million a year. The first failure was remarkably ordinary: nobody had a complete view of what was coming due.
- Valorant combines procurement advice with software that carries the work through.
- Its renewal playbook starts with owners and early warnings.
- Since September 2026, the firm and its Astra platform have shared one name: Zavo.
There is something wonderfully unglamorous about this problem. A company can employ clever people, buy sophisticated systems, and still lose negotiating room because the relevant date lives in the wrong spreadsheet. Valorant’s business sits in that gap between having information and doing something useful with it.
A calendar with financial consequences
In the financial services engagement, the intervention began with a central renewal calendar. Alerts went out 90, 60 and 30 days before key dates. Contracts acquired named owners, approval thresholds and escalation paths. Risky clauses were flagged early enough for procurement to run competitive processes and renegotiate.
The firm reports near-zero renewal leakage after 12 months and $15 million in annual leakage eliminated. Those are its published claims about an unnamed client. The detail worth copying is the sequence: first find the dates, then assign responsibility, then create enough time to exercise a choice. A reminder is commercially useful only while an alternative remains possible.
The advice needed somewhere to live
Valorant began as a procurement advisory firm in 2021, according to its current company history. Its founders include Ian Cotter, Tunir Chatterjee and Biju Mohan. Mohan joined as co-founder and managing partner in February 2024, after procurement and supply-chain leadership work at Accenture and GEP. His stated remit included GenAI, products and sustainability strategy.
The company’s account of its evolution identifies two recurring frustrations. Expertise stayed with the practitioners who had done the work. Meanwhile, purchasing activity was scattered among systems. A successful engagement could leave behind a better process without giving the next employee easy access to the reasoning behind it. AI, the founders argue, offered a way to connect that knowledge to daily decisions.
The technology became Astra. On September 22, 2026, Valorant announced that both company and platform would operate as Zavo. The change brought a broader intake-to-pay product direction, covering the journey from a purchase request through sourcing, contracts, suppliers and payment workflows.
“The future of procurement is knowing what matters, what is coming and where to act.”
Ian Cotter · Co-founder · September 2026
The queue can become the problem
Consider another published engagement, this time at a global software company. Approvals took weeks. Sourcing differed by department. Frustrated stakeholders bypassed procurement, creating spending outside the process. The mechanism is easy to recognize: a control that takes too long gives people an incentive to avoid it.
Valorant says it introduced delegated approval thresholds, standardized workflows and live dashboards. The reported result was a 35% reduction in cycle times and a 25% improvement in policy compliance. Faster decisions and stronger controls appeared together. Routine purchases no longer needed the same treatment as exceptional ones.
reduction in procurement cycle times
That example explains the product’s appeal better than a catalogue of AI features. Zavo describes intake through email, Teams, Slack or its web application. A request carries context forward, including supplier information and commercial history. The customer sets where the system acts automatically and where a person must decide. Automation depends on those boundaries being sensible.
Operators, with a subscription
The buyers are procurement and finance leaders, along with private equity operating teams. Public endorsements include Lightspeed, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Conagra Brands and Ingredion. Their problems vary: software renewals, direct-material specifications, supplier performance and sourcing discipline. The common requirement is a usable view of spending before commitments become difficult to change.
Valorant’s services include category strategy, sourcing events, negotiations, procurement organization design and implementation. Its private equity work applies shared playbooks and rate cards across portfolio companies. Under Zavo, the business combines those engagements with enterprise software subscriptions. Customers sign order forms and subscription agreements, while practitioners help configure processes and put them into operation.
Its market position spans procurement consulting and enterprise software. A buyer might compare the advisory work with GEP, Accenture or Kearney, and assess the software alongside procurement suites or orchestration tools. Astra advertised connections to systems including Coupa and SAP Ariba. The proposition is to bring category expertise into the workflow, with consultants close enough to carry the work through.
Clean the records before adding the agent
A fintech readiness case provides the necessary friction. Users were returning to old processes, cycle times remained high, and procurement struggled to demonstrate platform value. Valorant describes a 12-week assessment covering workflows, data access, technical feasibility and governance. The output was a ranked set of agents and an integration blueprint: preparation for deployment.
The practical lesson is to start with a bounded problem. Pick a category. Collect its contracts and notice periods. Name the owners. Agree with finance how savings will be measured. Then decide which repetitive steps deserve automation. The approach depends on accessible records, clear authority and people willing to use the process. Missing any of those makes an agent’s job considerably harder.
For a procurement leader, the interesting question is whether yesterday’s decision helps tomorrow’s buyer. A contract, a supplier record and a renewal date become more valuable when they travel together. Valorant’s shift toward Zavo puts that continuity at the center of the business. The calendar still matters. Now it has company.