When Microsoft acquired Suplari in 2021, we thought we knew what came next. Plug into Dynamics, scale across the world's largest enterprise customer base, and bring AI-driven finance and procurement to companies that had been sitting on mountains of untapped data. Four years later, Suplari is independent again, and both Microsoft and our customers think that's the right outcome.
Here's the story behind one of enterprise AI's more unusual moves, in my own words.
We built Suplari to be the nervous system of the enterprise
The idea behind Suplari was simple. Every large company has finance and procurement data scattered across SAP, Workday, Oracle, and a dozen other systems. Most of it never gets looked at. We wanted to connect all of that data and use AI to automate the hardest decisions executives, managers, and analysts have to make.
We were, and still are, a leader in applying AI to finance and procurement. That's what got Microsoft's attention.
Why Microsoft acquired us
At the time, Microsoft Dynamics had almost zero AI in the product. We'd been talking to them as a partner for about two years because we integrated with all the big procure-to-pay and ERP systems. The conversation kept coming back to the same thing: how do you take all this enterprise data — much of which was never actually used — and make it the core of decision-making?
Microsoft loved that value proposition. Right during the pandemic, they approached us about an acquisition, and we were open to it. The scale of Microsoft and Microsoft Dynamics was hard to argue with.
Then a small tool called ChatGPT changed everything
We closed in 2021. Microsoft had invested in OpenAI years before that, back in 2018 or 2019. But when ChatGPT launched in November of 2022, the world changed pretty dramatically, and Microsoft's priorities changed with it.
Microsoft went all-in on Copilot. Copilot became the big bet for the future of the company, and the plan was to roll it into every Microsoft product. Internally, that meant something specific: starting in November 2022, all investment in new products was redirected toward Copilot.
Suplari had been acquired just over a year earlier.
The hidden cost of being inside Microsoft
To be successful inside Microsoft, you need push-button deployment of your product to 400 or 500 data centers around the world. In practice, that involves rebuilding your product from scratch — for hyperscale compliance, security, and deployment. It's an enormous investment, and it's exactly the kind of investment Microsoft was now reserving for Copilot.
Meanwhile, Suplari had become core to the finance and procurement operations of 40 to 50 of Microsoft's most strategic customers. Those customers needed us to keep innovating, not to spend years on back-office compliance work.
That tension is what made the spin-out the right call.
Why the spin-out was good for everyone
Microsoft concluded, and we agreed, that customers would be better served if Suplari operated as an independent company again. So who owns Suplari today? Suplari is now an independent company owned by the founding team, with Microsoft retaining a minority stake. As an independent business, we can continue to take care of those strategic customers and keep innovating on the actual product instead of being absorbed into hyperscale plumbing.
We get to stay close to the customer and the customer problem, rather than spending our energy on compliance, security posture, and deployment across hundreds of data centers. That's a luxury you only have when you're not inside a hyperscaler.
Why smaller companies are better positioned in the AI era
Here's the broader lesson I took from this. When technology is changing as fast as AI is right now, the pattern of success is genuinely unknown.
If somebody said today, "We're just going to build ChatGPT again and compete," they probably wouldn't succeed. OpenAI, Anthropic, and — to Google's credit — Gemini are innovating so quickly that it's very hard for a large company to organize and focus around any single bet. And the patterns themselves keep shifting: from chat interfaces to autonomous agents, and soon to something approaching AGI.
In this era, the companies that win are the ones that can keep experimenting, stay close to real customer problems, and ship quickly. A lot of the greatest innovations are coming from great engineers and technologists at smaller companies that are tightly coupled to their customers.
That's a structural advantage, not a slogan. It's the reason Suplari is going to keep leading in AI for finance and procurement — and the reason both we and Microsoft believe customers are better off with us as an independent company.
About the author: Nikesh (Niki) Parekh is the former founder and CEO of Suplari. He remains an advisor and advocate for Suplari's vision to transform finance and procurement functions with AI.
