Byron Revels spent the last 15 years operating as a salesman for mostly early-stage startups. During that time, he worked closely with products and engineering teams to scale up companies.
Revels and his friend Matt Stewart (the two of whom first founded a business together while attending Clemson University) both often ran into one major issue in their work: A lot of buyers struggled to keep track of all the commitments made during the sales process.
Abra, a startup built around an AI-powered supplier performance management platform, was their solution to this problem.
The platform uses supplier scorecards to track commitments and monitor reports. Abra also enables users to manage meeting recordings, notes, proposals, contracts and billing information.
“It’s a platform that helps them really track all of the commitments made during a sales process or during the duration of relationship with a supplier,” said Revels, who is the startup’s CEO.
Abra also makes it easy for different stakeholders assigned to a certain vendor or supplier to provide input on how the relationship is going. The platform achieves this through AI integration on assorted messaging platforms.
A team member can make a comment about a particular supplier on Slack or in Microsoft Teams. The AI model then takes that information and determines which supplier the team member is talking about and which service level agreement or performance guarantee the comment relates to.
Revels said this feature is meant to address the application fatigue many in the field face. Integrating these interactions in one space means one fewer application people need to log into.
The Abra Difference
Historically, supplier performance management has been done by category or vendor managers rather than by the people who are actually building relationships with vendors and suppliers.
“They’re sitting there on the sidelines trying to go find different business leaders or stakeholders and trying to interact with them, get feedback from them,” Revels said. “And it’s just this disconnect internally.”
Many startups are also currently focused on talent density and strategy-based initiatives. This means an actual human performing these tasks is not often viewed as being cost-effective.
Abra is unique, Revels said, because the platform does not replace any existing contract management systems or procurement tools, but rather makes them more effective. What it’s replacing instead is the process of manually creating scorecards typically updated in software like Excel, Google Sheets or PowerPoint.
He said focusing on serving as the layer between a chat tool, like Slack, and the scorecard is incredibly valuable in that it allows the platform to truly act as a digital team member—quickly adding information to the system in the proper place.
Abra is primarily targeted towards larger customers or those looking to solve big problems—particularly Fortune 500 companies. Revels noted that they recently participated in Roundtable for North America, a competitive event where procurement managers from large companies can choose to partner or pilot with startups.
The Abra program was voted most innovative by members of the Roundtable group, and the startup matched with five Fortune 500 companies including Walmart, DoorDash and Warner Brothers. (The average is two, though matches are not guaranteed.)
QUICK BITS
Startup: Abra
Co-Founders: Byron Revels (CEO), Matt Stewart (CTO)
Founded: 2024
Team size: 3
Location: Charlotte, NC
Website: helloabra.com
Funding: Raising pre-seed
“We were not in procurement ourselves, we just interact with procurement in different ways, but that fresh perspective that we’ve brought to the table is one that has been repeatedly validated and confirmed as being very valuable by a slew of different procurement works now,” Revels said.
While Abra launched this May, they have also already signed with their first paying customer. The startup is currently raising a pre-seed round and has received an investment from GrepBeat sister company Primordial.
Moving forward, Revels said Abra will likely evolve into more of an AI-powered commitment management platform. The ability to document progress towards goals for teams or individuals, he added, has already been requested.
Currently, Revels said Abra is looking for additional design partners that can help inform what they are building as the company moves forward. Those interested can contact him at byron@helloabra.com.
