Vendr
The AI negotiation agent to help you save money on SaaS.
What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?
Vendr was founded in 2018 to make software buying fast, fair, and transparent. After joining Y Combinator in 2019, founder and CEO Ryan Neu built Vendr to help companies save money on SaaS through data-driven negotiations. Following its $150M Series B, Vendr evolved from a services-led business into an AI-first company, launching Ruth—the negotiation agent trained on the world’s largest dataset of SaaS pricing and negotiation insights—to help every buyer get a fair deal automatically.
What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
Software sales is broken. Buying SaaS still feels manual, slow, and opaque—buyers don’t know what a fair price is, and sellers spend months negotiating instead of closing deals. After leading SMB sales at HubSpot through its IPO, Ryan saw firsthand how inefficient the process had become. In 2018, he founded Vendr to fix it. Today, Vendr’s AI negotiation agent, Ruth, uses real pricing and contract data to help buyers get fair deals instantly—turning a once painful process into a transparent, data-driven transaction.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
Our long-term vision is to fix software sales by making every transaction data-driven and fair. If we succeed, no one will overpay for software again. Buyers will use AI agents like Ruth to get transparent, market-based prices instantly—and sellers will close deals faster with trust built in. Software buying will finally be as efficient and predictable as any other modern transaction.
