Spend Matters, a Hackett Group Division, is pleased to announce the 2025-2026 roster for our ‘Future 5’ procurement solution provider list. As in previous editions, our analysts have highlighted five start-ups that excite them the most. This year, the five companies they see as potential future trendsetters are Flowie, Pavus, Tamarin AI, Vallor and Zapro.
To earn such recognition, these vendors must have a product that is ideally two to five years old, is used by more than five customers and showcases an innovative use of technology. Additionally, these vendors should have revenue below $10 million, and our analysts must determine that they are both sustainable and growing with clear momentum.
In this series of articles, we explain what these vendors offer, why they are likely to become future members of our 50 to Watch and 50 to Know procurement provider lists, and what challenges they might encounter.
Get to know all the procurement tech providers that made our lists this year.
What is Tamarin AI
Tamarin AI is a category management (CatMan) copilot designed with ease for the casual user in mind. It uses agentic AI to support users in time consuming, tedious tasks, such as data cleansing and categorization, automated analytics, drafting emails and analyzing contracts.
It allows users to chat with their data in plain language. Its interface is similar to common search engines like Google or Bing, with options to discover, visualize, explore or optimize data.
The offering is currently divided into three sub-sections by assistant type:
- Value Capture Assistant integrates with analytics dashboards to analyze contracts, create RFPs, generate reports and benchmark prices.
- Agentic Procurement Strategy focuses on strategic analysis and risk mitigation, such as creating savings plans, identifying alternative suppliers and tracking potential supplier risks.
- Spend Cleansing and Categorization automatically cleanses and categorizes raw data into spend cubes in 48 hours or less.
Why we chose Tamarin AI
We selected Tamarin AI for the 2025/2026 edition of Future 5 because it is an interesting vendor in the emerging and rapidly growing field of agentic agent offerings. The solution is already a useful tool for a wide range of organizations, regardless of industry or size, as it is built to simplify data processes — and every organization has messy data to some degree.
Tamarin AI may be especially helpful for organizations that are looking to move away from Excel as a primary hub for all procurement-related data, as it is less complex than many spend analytics software offerings and therefore may be a good transition step between the two.
Threats or challenges ahead
Tamarin AI was founded in 2023 but went to market in 2025; realistically, the entire market for agentic copilot solutions itself is in its infancy. With this in mind, one clear threat facing Tamarin AI is the potential for this market not to continue the way many envision, perhaps due to economic uncertainty, as agentic AI is by nature quite expensive to develop.
Additionally, beyond high-level market concerns, Tamarin AI also competes against more established vendors that also specialize in data management or analysis, such as spend analytics and MDM providers. While Tamarin AI could feasibly serve as a supplement to these more established players, as the market continues to develop AI for more traditional solutions, Tamarin AI may struggle to establish a clear foothold.
Read our interview: An Introduction to Tamarin AI here to discover how the vendor describes itself.
Join our analyst-led webinar on April 15 to discover more about the selection process.
