Supply chains make the world go round. And nothing brought that fact to the fore more than when they broke down during the Pandemic, creating shortages and panic buying.
Not surprisingly the software and intelligence to manage supplier relationships is a large and fast-growing business. In 2020, the global supply chain management market was valued at $15.85 billion and is expected to reach almost $31 billion by 2026, according to the latest data from Statista.
Stephany Lapierre, Founder and CEO, TealBook.
Yet the foundational data that supports all of that software was either lacking or non-existent until a former Canadian ski-bum, Stephany Lapierre, decided to create it through the formation of TealBook in 2014.
Lapierre is the founder and CEO of the Toronto-based TealBook, which utilizes AI to autonomously enrich supplier data across millions of global suppliers. With minimal implementation required, the platform offers an enhanced and consolidated view of an organization’s supplier base, valuable insights, reporting, supplier search and outreach capabilities. This founder’s journey story is based on my interview with Lapierre.
“The inspiration for TealBook came from my own experience,” says Lapierre. She had spent years building a successful procurement services consulting business when she had an epiphany about the idea of automating the process of supplier information after meeting with one of her clients at a large pharmaceutical company. The client wanted to introduce Lapierre to a new company but couldn’t remember the name. She then took out a two-inch binder and started flipping through pages of business cards to find it. After 10 minutes of riffling through the book, she finally found the right card and asked Lapierre to write down the name and give the card back to her because she didn’t want to lose it.
“It was this notion of having a black book, your card book of businesses, your suppliers who are enriching your business that enables you to be competitive. The knowledge is not easily transferred. It's stuck in binders or in people's heads and spreadsheets and emails. And who was it really benefiting if that company can’t leverage this knowledge, especially as there was this big target to reduce the supplier base by 50%? Because the cost of maintaining 100,000 suppliers is astronomical,” says Lapierre.
That meeting set Lapierre on the journey of building a dynamic data base that would allow businesses to capture their supplier information previously locked away in unstructured sources in various formats across the organization. The process of building that database started in 2014, but expanded rapidly with the introduction of artificial intelligence that would allow TealBook to automate the process, including scouring the Web for publicly available supplier company information that is updated in realtime. Lapierre says the name for her company comes from “Teal” symbolising transparency and “Book” in reference to that client’s book of cards.
“Every single enterprise in the world is crippled by the fact that they don't have visibility, at the speed and scale that they need to be able to address their supply chain challenges. Ever evolving priorities on supplier sourcing, business outcomes and regulatory reporting are all changing at a speed they’ve never seen before. change, all those requirements that are coming at them at the speed that they've never seen before. They can't do it because they don't have the data,” says Lapierre.
TealBook has been particularly helpful to organisations looking to solve problems like identifying qualified suppliers that could help company’s meet their ESG goals or sourcing new procurement channels during the Pandemic induced supply chain challenges.
“The impact we have had on supplier diversity has been massive. Some 95% of businesses that qualify to be small or diverse are not certified. So not only can we give a huge uplift on certified businesses that our clients could report to the regulators, we could also show customers businesses that look like they're women owned, veteran owned, and LGBTQ, are the certain size or certain location, but they're not certified and then reach out to them to self certify,” says Lapierre.
TealBook’s growth increased dramatically starting in 2019, and now has some 130 employees, up from 45 over the past year. Customers are using TealBook’s supplier data to supplement and enhance the value of their supply chain process management software from the likes of Oracle and SAP. Its agnostic approached to the market has allowed it to develop formal partnerships with SAP, Jaggaer, GEP and Ivalua.
TealBook’s momentum, partner strategy and large addressable market has attracted $73 million in financing to date. Its most recent B round in December of 2021 raised $40 million, led by Ten Coves Capital. Additional investors include CIBC Innovation Banking, RTB Global, Silicon Valley Bank, Refinery Ventures, Reciprocal Ventures, Grand Ventures, Good Friends, S&P Global, Workday Ventures, The Royal Bank of Canada and others.
Lapierre grew up in Montreal, Canada where she spoke only French. She was surrounded by entrepreneurs. Her grandfather started Pepsi bottling in Canada in the ‘40s. After he died at around 60 years old, his wife took over running the business even though she had three children to raise and fought to keep the business and ran it until PepsiCo bought all the smaller distributors and bottlers. “Seeing this really classy, also really feminine woman, raising kids on her own, travelling the world to me was really appealing from a figure of what I thought, being in business and being feminine and being a mother could mean. So that was pretty inspirational,” says Lapierre, who herself now has three children.
Her dad wound up running the business. Lapierre refers to him as being a kind and caring boss who knew all of his employees and their families. She sees her mom as being the tough one who is resilient with a “joie de vivre” with nothing fazing her. “So I'd like to think I get both of that,” says Lapierre.
At the age of 18, She left Montreal in search of adventure and to learn English by becoming a ski instructor in Whistler, British Colombia and never looked back. “You get to meet people from different backgrounds, you get to interact with CEOs of companies to people that are in the army to people from different cultures and background, which opened my mind to what was out there,” says Lapierre.
After being there for a season, she decided to go to university with the objective to meet people that could help her build a business. She was in such a hurry to start her entrepreneurial life that she finished her degree from the University of Guelph in Ontario in two and one-half years and then started her first business doing corporate events. After a few stints in marketing and business development in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, she started her second business as a procurement and supply chain consultant in 2007 before starting TealBook in 2014.
As for the future? “I want to TealBook to be the best source of supplier data. As we continue to grow, the power of the network is quite a big moat for us and becomes increasingly more valuable, not just to the buy side, but the insight that we can enable on the sell side, the insight we can enable on the investment community. We have a chance to build a pretty special, multibillion dollar company, if we stay agnostic,” concludes Lapierre.
