A pen ought to be an easy thing to buy. Choose one. Pay for it. Try to remember where you put it. Inside a business, that small purchase can acquire an approval chain, a vendor account, an invoice and several people who would rather be doing something else. Zach Garippa has spent a decade taking this apparently minor inconvenience seriously.
The co-founder and CEO of Order.co came to software through finance, with an earlier education at the entrance of a Park Avenue apartment building. His company began with conversations about office supplies. It now builds purchasing and finance automation for businesses whose everyday shopping has become a job of its own. The distance between those two points is the story: a founder who kept looking at the same problem while the tools for solving it changed.
A train ride before a pitch deck
Garippa grew up in Brooklyn, attended Regis High School and studied finance and economics at Boston College. After college came Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management. He has described his financial background through the interaction of people, numbers and decisions. That is a useful distinction when the eventual business involves persuading people to change something they do every working week.
His earliest commercial education was more literal. He spent summers working as a doorman on Park Avenue, an experience he credits with developing his street smarts. The detail sits comfortably beside the finance degree. Both jobs place a person between someone who wants something and the practical business of getting it done.
Then there was Baltimore. Tom Jaklitsch was at Johns Hopkins, and Garippa travelled down by train as they investigated the needs of local business owners. Their subject was ordinary purchasing: cleaning supplies, coffee creamer, the things a company needs whether or not anyone feels like comparing vendors. The founders were asking questions where the work happened.
They spent nearly two years researching before leaving their existing paths to launch. Garippa left Morgan Stanley; Jaklitsch left college. By April 2016, their four-person team was participating in New York's Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. An early investment came from A-Level Capital, the student-run Hopkins venture fund. The company was called Negotiatus.
“If we don't save them any money, we don't make any money.”
Tom Jaklitsch, describing the early model in 2016
The customer had better things to do
“My background in finance is grounded in the human element.”
Zach Garippa
Negotiatus initially charged a 20 percent commission on savings. Shipping needs and preferred brands went into its analysis; the combination of technology and hands-on effort was intended to find customers a better deal. The founders were selling purchasing attention to people whose own attention was already spoken for.
That starting point helps explain Garippa's attachment to the problem. A business can know it is wasting money and still lack the time to investigate. Buying a cheaper item may require another account, another search and another bill to reconcile. The sticker price is only one part of the nuisance.
By 2021, he was describing centralization as the first step: put purchasing in one place so companies can make informed decisions. Finance, operations and procurement were dealing with multiple vendors and large numbers of invoices. Order's answer combined a shopping experience, automated purchasing and payments, visibility into spending, and consolidated billing.
Garippa's emphasis on people mattered here. A workflow has to accommodate what a team actually needs, including needs that change. A finance department's tidy rule can become an operations department's afternoon-long detour. His ambition was to make their decisions work together.
One purchase crosses several desks. Garippa built around the whole trip.
Six months under observation
In 2018, 645 Ventures invested after getting to know the company over roughly six months. During that period, its annualized revenue more than doubled. The investor's case centred on the mid-market: companies with purchasing complexity and fewer resources for the expensive, lengthy implementations associated with enterprise systems.
That positioning gave Garippa a practical constituency. Distributed teams were buying office supplies, IT equipment and break-room necessities through disconnected tools. Connecting email, spreadsheets and vendor websites could produce an immediate benefit. Customers did not need to acquire a new enthusiasm for procurement. They needed their existing work to become easier.
There was a social version of that argument, too. At a Regis technology gathering in January 2019, Garippa joined WeWork's Artie Minson and Lincoln International's Roger Knight on a panel about smaller companies gaining access to the scale of larger ones. The discussion fitted his own business: help an operator obtain buying capabilities that size usually buys.
A shorter name, a longer commitment
On January 25, 2022, Negotiatus announced a $30 million Series B and a new name: Order. Stage 2 Capital led the round via a direct investment from MIT's endowment. Other participants included Clocktower Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Seven Peaks Ventures and Ankona. Former Salesforce president and CFO Mark Hawkins also invested and became an adviser.
The name change came with a visual identity developed by GrandArmy. Its organising device was a filled circle, the O in Order, used to contain products, services and other elements of the brand. The design made a simple promise visible: a place for things that had previously been scattered.
Garippa's commercial argument reached back to the moment a customer chooses an item. If the platform participates there, it can help with what happens downstream. Waiting until payment leaves many of the decisions already made. In his formulation, purchasing gives the company its opening into payments.
He also offered a surprisingly restrained prescription for founders with limited cash: identify one or two growth levers and put resources behind them. A dollar spread across ten competing priorities does less work. It is advice with the appeal of a properly organised cupboard: obvious once someone has finally done it.
Series B announced alongside the change from Negotiatus to Order.
The backpack gets heavier
One revealing Garippa anecdote involves a sales book. In 2016, he carried multiple copies of Mark Roberge's The Sales Acceleration Formula in his backpack and handed them to people he thought would benefit. Years later, anticipating Roberge's next book, he publicly warned that the bag was about to become heavier again.
It is an unusually physical way to share a business idea. A link would have been lighter. A book in a bag requires planning, carrying and the expectation that a conversation may become useful to someone else. The anecdote gives his interest in sales a personable shape.
His relationship with Hawkins has a similar quality. Garippa describes the former Salesforce executive as an investor, friend and mentor who continues to help with seemingly small questions. He admires the willingness to make time. As a mentor at Elbow Grease, Garippa now participates in that exchange from the other side.
The accelerator's account of their own connection starts with Garippa approaching Dan Teran for advice and leaving with an angel investment. Asking a question can have a surprisingly long afterlife. In Garippa's case, it has helped build both a company and a network of people willing to answer the next one.
AI gets an assignment
By September 2025, Order.co was putting its AI ambitions into a Command Center beta. It grouped agents around finance, purchasing and procurement. The examples were specific: analyse spending, rebuild a recurring supply order, track deliveries or find product alternatives that meet a company's requirements.
Jaklitsch described applying AI models to nine years of operational data. That context is central to the proposition. An acceptable substitute depends on the buyer, the budget and the circumstances. The system has to understand more than a product description to make a useful suggestion.
Garippa carried the same argument into a January 2026 conversation about software and AI. He described impressive products built before their creators had identified a problem to solve. His preference was to begin with the problem and keep working on it. The technology earns its place through usefulness.
He remains enthusiastic about AI. His test is demanding because his customers already have a job to finish. A recommendation that creates another task has competition from simply continuing with the old method. The ordinary purchase remains a useful examination paper.
The next cheque still takes work
A filmed visit published in January 2026 followed Garippa through efforts to raise a $50 million Series C. It described a company serving more than 300 customers and connecting 40,000 vendors. The film's account also reported a term sheet secured after filming. A term sheet is a milestone in a financing process; the work of building and selling continues around it.
By March, Order.co announced its sixth consecutive inclusion in the procurement technology “50 to Watch” list. Garippa's focus was on agents that anticipate purchasing needs and act on them. A decade after the early supply-buying conversations, the task still had recognisable edges: help businesses choose, order and pay with less work.
There is room in this story for the early doorman, the finance graduate and the founder carrying books for other people. Each brings a different kind of attention. Garippa's bet has been that enough attention to an overlooked chore can become a business. Somewhere, someone still needs a pen. He would like buying it to take less of their day.