At five o'clock, a contractor closes a laptop, returns a badge, and vanishes. Not literally, of course. The person may have spent a year writing code, tending patients, or keeping a data center upright. But in the corporate ledger, the departure can be surprisingly spectral. Payroll knew the employees. Procurement knew the supplier. A hiring manager knew the human. No system necessarily knew all three.
VNDLY was built for this administrative ghost story. Its software keeps the record of external work: who requested it, which vendor supplied it, what it costs, what was promised in the statement of work, whether the worker cleared onboarding, when the invoice should be paid, and whether access disappeared when the assignment ended. The business is not glamorous. Neither is a missing laptop.
The short version
- VNDLY gives large organizations one system for contingent workers, suppliers, statements of work, invoices, compliance, and worker profiles.
- Its sharpest advantage is a direct connection to Workday HCM, joining employee and non-employee data without pretending they are managed identically.
- The company raised about $57.5 million, survived a bad COVID quarter, and was acquired by Workday for approximately $510 million in 2021.
- In 2026, its new AI agent began grading applicants and resurfacing previously vetted talent.
A duopoly older than Y2K
The idea came from Narayan Surabhi in late 2016. Shashank Saxena, then fresh from leading digital strategy work at Kroger, was not immediately persuaded. He researched the vendor-management market and found what founders dream of finding: a large category, changing customers, and incumbents old enough to have worried about the millennium bug.
Saxena later said two companies controlled roughly 90 percent of the market. His more important observation was about the product itself. Vendor management systems had been built as back-office machinery for rate cards, time sheets, and invoices. Yet managers were increasingly using contractors as a working talent pool. A system designed for accountants now had to behave like a talent product - easy enough for a busy manager to use without a ceremonial week of training.
The founders called the company VNDLY, a vowel-starved marriage of “vendor” and “friendly.” The name contained the wager. Suppliers would see data quickly enough to improve their fill rates. Managers would get an interface meant for humans. APIs would let the software sit inside a wider workforce stack rather than demand to be its own lonely kingdom.
Today the suite has three foundations. Extended Workforce Management follows contingent labor from requisition to offboarding. Statement of Work manages projects, roles, budgets, milestones, change orders, and vendors. Worker Profile Management records people whose time or expenses may live elsewhere. Around them sit approvals, rate controls, reporting, global invoicing, security permissions, and integrations. HR, procurement, finance, IT, the managed-service provider, the staffing agency, and the contractor all touch the same machine from different doors.
The price of being early
VNDLY raised $3 million in 2017 before it had a product or a customer. The software launched in early 2018. In 2019 came an $11 million Series A, then a $35 million Series B led by Insight Partners. An $8.5 million extension in 2020 brought disclosed financing to roughly $57.5 million. That cash paid for product development, global expansion, customer support, and the unromantic work of making enterprise software survive enterprise scrutiny.
Capital in, acquisition out
Bars show sequence, not a common scale. Workday's figure was acquisition consideration, principally cash and subject to adjustments.
Then the world stopped. Saxena describes one genuinely bad quarter after COVID-19 arrived. Companies froze decisions because everyone first imagined a short emergency. When it became clear that the disruption had a longer lease, spending resumed. The need had not disappeared. It had become easier to explain: a flexible workforce is not very flexible when its records are scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets.
The connector that changed the argument
VNDLY's decisive product was also a relationship. It became a Workday Access Partner and, in August 2021, the first vendor management system with a Workday-certified HCM connector. By the time the companies joined, more than two dozen customers were already using the integration.
This is where the founders changed their minds about scale. VNDLY could remain an independent system that happened to speak to Workday. Or the two products could share a future. Customers supplied the answer. Saxena has said that 76 percent of VNDLY's revenue came from replacing older vendor-management systems. Many buyers were simultaneously replacing PeopleSoft with Workday. Modernize the employee record, then modernize the contractor record, and the two purchases began to look like one architecture.
Workday announced the acquisition in November 2021 for consideration of approximately $510 million, principally cash, and closed it in December. In 2023, the product became Workday VNDLY. The buyer did not erase every independent-company choice. It kept indirect contracts through managed service providers, the percentage-of-spend transaction model, and native support for third-party services such as Coupa and Okta. This mattered. A workforce ecosystem stops being an ecosystem when the new owner bricks up all the side doors.
Seven systems walk into a hospital
Banner Health offers the cleanest demonstration of what the product actually buys. Its contract labor program had outgrown email, spreadsheets, and disconnected software during and after the pandemic. After bringing Workday VNDLY alongside Workday HCM, Banner reduced seven systems to one. Data entry fell from 30 minutes to three minutes per worker. Onboarding dropped from 14 days to seven. Time to source external workers fell 66 percent. Bringing the program in-house saved millions of dollars in annual administrative fees.
Zions Bancorporation found a different kind of value. Standardizing and rebenchmarking contracts took 10 percent off its books on launch day, while a 75 percent reduction in preferred suppliers improved its negotiating position. The software did not invent the savings. It made the agreed rates, suppliers, approvals, and exceptions difficult to ignore. Enterprise systems are at their best when they turn policy from a PDF into a path.
These are large-company problems. Workday VNDLY is sold as enterprise cloud software, directly and through MSP partners, with transaction economics linked to program spend. Public list pricing is not available. The likely alternatives are SAP Fieldglass, Beeline, Magnit, Coupa's contingent-workforce tools, and SimplifyVMS. VNDLY's strongest case is not that every module is unique. It is that a company already committed to Workday HCM can connect the external workforce to the same core data foundation.
Where the fit is strong
- A large contingent workforce across countries or business units
- Workday HCM already holds the employee record
- Procurement, HR, finance, and IT need shared controls
- Services procurement and SOW work are material costs
Where the math gets weaker
- A small contractor population managed by one team
- No need for global tax, currency, or invoicing support
- A patchwork stack that demands many custom integrations
- A simple intake-and-approval form would solve the real problem
There is a less charming side to a unified record: implementation quality matters. Locations, job profiles, suppliers, worker identities, security attributes, and historical assignments must be mapped accurately. A company with vague ownership can replace seven untidy tools with one very expensive untidy tool. The advantage compounds when Workday is already the center of gravity, the contingent program is large enough to justify governance, and business owners agree on the data before migration. Without those conditions, the celebrated connector can become just another integration project.
What another builder can steal
- Look for an old system facing a new user. VMS software moved from the back office to hiring managers, which changed what “good” meant.
- Build beside the system customers already trust. The Workday connector reduced the political cost of buying a young vendor.
- Measure retired friction. Minutes per record, days to onboard, systems removed, and supplier counts persuade better than adjectives.
- Keep the ecosystem alive after the deal. MSP contracts and third-party APIs survived because customers had built operating models around them.
- Time the replacement wave. Saxena has said VNDLY started five years earlier might not have worked. A neglected category is useful only when buyers are ready to move.
The ledger begins to act
In September 2026, Workday made the VNDLY Contingent Sourcing Agent generally available. It uses HiredScore AI for two jobs. Applicant grading compares resumes with job requirements, assigns a grade, and explains the reasoning. Talent rediscovery searches people already known inside a customer's VNDLY tenant, looking for prior experience, location, and roles that match a new request.
System of record → system of action
The agent does not make the hiring decision. It arranges the queue, shows its rationale, and returns known talent to view. Humans keep the last word.
The distinction is important. A static VMS remembers what happened. An active one can shorten the next search and avoid paying to rediscover someone the company already vetted. It also raises the familiar questions of bias, data quality, and human review. Workday says the agent presents explanations, keeps decision-makers in control, and undergoes fairness testing. That is the correct promise: not an oracle, but a clerk with an excellent memory and a transparent pencil.
VNDLY's original insight survives the AI fashion. The enterprise did not lack workers. It lacked a coherent account of them. First the company made the invisible workforce visible. Now it wants the record to recommend what happens next. The org chart, once tidily fictional, is learning to admit who does the work.