Coupa Acquires Tonkean to Expand AI Spend Management

Coupa is expanding its agentic artificial intelligence ambitions with the acquisition of Tonkean, a deal aimed at making procurement and global trade workflows more autonomous from request to payment.

The cloud-native spend management company said Wednesday (May 21) that it acquired Tonkean, an AI-native intake and orchestration platform used by enterprise procurement, legal and internal service teams. Coupa said the deal strengthens its ability to offer “Agentic-as-a-Service” capabilities across its network of more than 3,500 buyers and 10 million suppliers.

The acquisition gives Coupa another layer of workflow automation at a time when companies are trying to reduce manual handoffs in purchasing, supplier management and payments. Tonkean brings a natural language interface that lets users submit and track requests, as well as a no-code process builder and more than 250 native connectors that can sit around a customer’s existing systems without requiring a full rip-and-replace technology overhaul.

Coupa said Tonkean’s platform has helped increase user adoption by 2.2 times, reduce cycle times by 50% and save operations teams more than 30 hours per week. The company also said Tonkean adds an advanced framework for multi-agent orchestration and agent-to-agent coordination, allowing AI agents to execute more complex workflows across buyers, suppliers and internal teams.

The move is part of a larger acquisition strategy. Tonkean is Coupa’s fourth strategic acquisition tied to its agentic trade network vision, following Cirtuo, Scoutbee and Rossum. Together, Coupa says, those assets add category management, supplier intelligence, document-reading capabilities and now workflow orchestration to its spend management platform.

“This is a deliberate, strategic step toward building the #1 agentic trade network,” said Salvatore Lombardo, Coupa’s chief product and technology officer.

The implication for CFOs, procurement chiefs and payments leaders is clear: AI in the back office is moving beyond recommendations and dashboards. Coupa is trying to build a system that can read documents, route requests, coordinate approvals, connect suppliers and execute pieces of the transaction flow. That could make procurement faster and more consistent, but it also raises the bar for clean data, governance and trust in automated workflows.

PYMNTS has tracked Coupa’s push toward autonomous spend management and AI-driven procurement. In February, PYMNTS reported that Coupa brought agentic AI features to its spend management platform, adding more than 100 features aimed at operational efficiency and supplier collaboration. In May, PYMNTS covered Coupa’s acquisition of Cirtuo, which added AI-powered category management to its roadmap. In October, PYMNTS reported that Coupa added four AI agents to its spend management platform, including tools for analytics, bid evaluation, request creation and knowledge support. The Tonkean deal extends that same arc, moving Coupa from AI-assisted spend management toward more fully orchestrated, agent-driven trade.

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