He looked at purchase orders and saw a fortune. Everyone else looked away.
Start with the alarm. It goes off at 3:30 in the morning, and Zachary Garippa is already reaching for it. Not because a crisis demands it. Because the quiet does.
By the time most of Manhattan is pouring its first coffee, Garippa has already had his most useful hours. The pre-dawn is his - no meetings, no Slack, no investors waiting on a number. Just the strategic thinking that gets crowded out once the sun and the calendar take over. He calls his approach one driven by necessity, not routine. The distinction matters to him.
What he is building with those hours is Order.co, the New York company he co-founded in 2016. The pitch is deceptively boring: make buying things for a business feel like buying things for yourself. The reality behind that sentence is a platform connecting more than 40,000 vendors, serving over 300 customers, and moving close to half a billion dollars in annualized spend.
Boring is the point. Nobody starts a company because purchase orders excite them. Garippa did the opposite - he stared at the unglamorous machinery of how companies buy paper, supplies, and services, and decided the whole thing was broken. Operations, finance, and procurement teams were juggling dozens of vendors, chasing compliance, and drowning in thousands of invoices a month. He saw a market that consumer software had left behind.
Order was built to bring the simplicity of platforms like Amazon into the business world.
The resume does not read like a straight line to a CEO chair. Before the fintech, there was a Morgan Stanley Wealth Management desk, where Garippa worked as a Registered Client Services Associate - business analytics, proposals, capital markets, research, trading, the appraisal of client performance. Numbers and decisions. Earlier still, there was a job most founders leave off the slide deck: a doorman in a luxury apartment building.
He studied Finance and Economics at Boston College's Carroll School of Management. It was at the Morgan Stanley desk that the itch started. The markets around buying physical goods, he realized, were nowhere near as efficient as they could be. Businesses deserved a better way to buy and pay. So in 2016 he built one, alongside his brother Matt Garippa, Tom Jaklitsch, and Brendan Eapen.
They called it Negotiatus. It was a fine name for a product about negotiation. It was a terrible name for a human to spell out over the phone.
In 2025, Negotiatus became Order.co. The official reasons were strategic - the new name better reflected an expanding set of services, from guided B2B marketplace to embedded fintech. The unofficial reason was refreshingly human: Negotiatus was, in the company's own words, difficult to say and to spell.
There is a small lesson buried in that decision. Plenty of founders defend a bad name out of pride. Garippa's team looked at the friction and removed it, the same instinct that built the product in the first place. Solving problems, as the founders put it, begins with a new perspective.
The rename sat on top of real momentum. A $30 million Series B, led by Stage 2 Capital with a direct investment from MIT's endowment, had already landed. The vendor network had grown roughly 200% since 2020. Revenue was climbing year over year. And in 2024, Garippa was named one of the Top 50 Financial Technology CEOs.
I am trying to build the greatest company New York has ever seen.
Abstract problems are hard to sell. So consider a concrete one. In the cannabis industry, where operators run across many separate legal entities, the plumbing of purchasing gets absurd. Acreage Holdings, a multi-state operator, once had to set up twelve different WB Mason accounts - because it was buying across twelve different entities. Twelve logins. Twelve invoices streams. One very tired accounts-payable team.
That is the friction Order eats for a living. Vendors often refuse net terms to cannabis companies, choking cash flow. Multi-state operators drowned in duplicated accounts. Order consolidated it: one platform, custom catalogs, integrated payments, one bill. Clients save an average of 13% on purchases, with returns that typically run 2x to 7x their subscription fee. Onboarding can take as little as 48 hours.
It is not a glamorous story. It is a useful one. And usefulness, at Garippa's scale, compounds into something close to half a billion dollars flowing through the system.
As of 2026, Garippa is in the middle of raising a Series C, targeting roughly $50 million. The capital has a clear destination: expand sales capacity to meet demand the team can't yet cover, push harder on AI-powered product capabilities, and pursue strategic acquisitions. He has been profiled, only half-jokingly, as the CEO who never sleeps.
The ambition is not subtle, and he does not pretend otherwise. He wants Order.co to be the greatest company New York has ever seen. It is the kind of line that sounds like bravado until you notice the man saying it has been awake since 3:30 building toward it, one invoice at a time.
He co-founded the company with his brother, Matt Garippa. Family business, fintech edition.
The 3:30 a.m. start isn't a hustle-culture flex - he frames it as necessity, the only quiet he gets.
Before tech, he worked a Morgan Stanley desk and, earlier, a door in a luxury apartment building.
The old name Negotiatus was scrapped partly because nobody could spell it.
MIT's endowment put money directly into his Series B. Not a fund - the endowment itself.
Compiled from public sources including Order.co, The Org, Crunchbase, EnterpriseCEO, Ganjapreneur, and Boston College. Figures are as reported publicly and may have since changed.
Zachary Garippa is the co-founder and CEO of Order.co, the New York B2B spend-management and guided-purchasing platform he started in 2016 as Negotiatus. A Boston College finance grad who once worked a Morgan Stanley desk and a luxury-building door, Garippa built Order into a company connecting 40,000-plus vendors, serving 300-plus customers, and processing nearly half a billion dollars in annualized spend. He rises at 3:30 a.m., says he is 'trying to build the greatest company New York has ever seen,' and is chasing a Series C to get there.
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