Tradeshift Lands Huge Global Client For Its New CloudScan Product

Tradeshift, the free invoicing platform which seems to be making quite a bit of headway lately, has landed a very large client. Normally we wouldn’t note such events, but this one is big. Vestas Wind Systems is the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines and generates enough electricity to provide for over 21m people in 70 countries and on six continents. It has 20,000 employees, 10,000 suppliers across the world and handles 300,000 exchanged invoices a year. As you can imagine, electronic invoicing would make sense.

We’re told the thing that swung it for them was Tradeshift’s new feature called CloudScan. This means that any invoice emailed to Vestas is automatically converted via OCR and bounced back to the supplier to validate it. That means that the process is 100% electronic and happens in a few seconds.

Tradeshift’s model, where it’s free to get suppliers onto the platform, also helped. Often electronic invoicing systems require suppliers to pay to start using the service.

Competitors to Tradeshift include Ariba, OB10, Coupa and Maventa.