San Francisco-based Fragment has come out of stealth with $56 million in total funding to automate direct procurement work at large physical goods companies. Its agents investigate and resolve the purchasing and payment exceptions that still consume procurement teams, instead of only flagging them for humans.
What Fragment builds
Fragment builds software that turns a company’s operating knowledge into autonomous action. Its Autonomous Context Engine, known as ACE, connects information across existing systems and captures the policies, relationships and institutional knowledge that experienced employees rely on every day.
Agents built on ACE investigate exceptions such as order changes and invoice discrepancies, decide on the right response and carry out authorised resolutions. The system works with data where it lives, so customers do not need to migrate data into a new platform or start a lengthy integration project.
Fragment says its approach is already at work at Graybar and CNX, two large physical goods businesses. The company prices its software around work completed by its agents rather than user seats, which ties what customers pay to the operational burden the agents remove.
The funding
The $56 million total covers a Series A round led by 8VC and a seed round co-led by General Catalyst and A*. Angel investors include Roelof Botha, Nikesh Arora, Jeff Wilke, Eric Wu and Dennis Cinelli.
Fragment said the money will support further development of ACE, expansion across source to pay workflows and deployments with more of the world’s largest enterprises.
Pranav Mulgund, Fragment co-founder and chief executive, put it this way.
We deliberately started with direct procurement at large enterprises with the most complex supply chains because solving that challenge could fundamentally change what enterprise software can do.
Why procurement first
At global manufacturers, order changes, invoice discrepancies, shortages and tariff changes constantly revise purchasing plans. Employees must piece together information across systems and teams, often relying on institutional knowledge and unwritten business rules to decide what to do next.
Jack Moshkovich, a partner at 8VC, put it this way.
Most software companies earn their way into the enterprise over time. Fragment started there.
Fragment was founded by Pranav Mulgund and Naveen Kashyap. Mulgund grew up in a manufacturing family and later scaled products at Zoom for frontline workers in manufacturing, healthcare and education. Kashyap previously worked in generative AI research and helped scale an enterprise applied AI platform.
