Suplari story begins with hot coffee, good friends, and bad ideas.

The inception. Jeff Gerber was introduced to Niki Parekh by a common friend, Mark Jancola, who had worked with Niki at HouseValues, and with Jeff at Opsware. For six years, Niki and Jeff met for a cup of coffee to exchange bad ideas.

In the intervening time, Niki’s companies (ActiveRain/Market Leader/Trulia) had been sold to Zillow, while Jeff’s company Apptio went public. Jeff identified a hard problem where enterprise data related to purchasing was trapped in siloed enterprise systems. Even the most basic reporting was a lot of work. Jeff saw an opportunity to move that data to the cloud, and use AI and Machine learning to identify patterns.

As a former exec with Trulia and Zillow, Niki had seen how the democratization of data and predictive forecasting changed the real estate industry.  

Enter the third amigo: Brian White. Jeff and Brian founded iConclude in 2007, which was ultimately sold to HP. After HP, Brian joined Amazon Web Services and then Skytap. When Jeff pitched the idea for Suplari, Brian agreed.

Why Suplari? Every company needs a name. Suplari’s vision is to put the enterprise and the employee back in charge when dealing with their suppliers. Suplari would like to be the trusted, impassionate advisor and confidant for the enterprise, challenging long held beliefs. Trusted advisor? Think consigliere from the Sicilian and American Mafia. Think Godfather. Supplier + Consigliere = Suplari!