Stefan Dent built one of procurement's most respected tech platforms, then walked away to solve a problem hiding in plain sight — how private equity portfolios are haemorrhaging millions in fragmented, uncoordinated spend. Now, with Mulberri and a partnership with SaaSrooms, he's handing PE firms a new weapon.
Stefan Dent
Founder & CEO, Mulberri. Formerly a senior leader at Simfoni, where he helped build one of the procurement sector's leading spend analytics and sourcing platforms. Now focused exclusively on group procurement leverage for private equity.
Philip Allouche
CEO of SaaSrooms Tech Spend Management, the specialist platform helping organisations benchmark, renegotiate and optimise their software spend. Philip is a recognised voice on SaaS cost intelligence, PE portfolio efficiency, and the future of tech procurement.
There’s a peculiar irony at the heart of private equity. Firms celebrated for forensic financial discipline — firms that can dissect an EBITDA bridge in minutes and negotiate terms most would blanch at — routinely allow their portfolio companies to buy the same software, insurance, logistics and services independently, at wildly different prices, with zero collective bargaining power. Stefan Dent saw this gap, and built Mulberri to close it.
On origins & the founding story
Stefan, you were a senior figure at Simfoni — a platform that became genuinely respected in enterprise procurement. That’s not a comfortable berth to leave. What did you see that made you walk away and start again?
Simfoni was an extraordinary experience. We built something that genuinely moved the needle for large enterprises — real spend visibility, real sourcing intelligence. I’m proud of what the team achieved there. But what I kept bumping into, particularly as we worked with more and more PE-backed businesses, was this massive, almost wilful blind spot.
These portfolio companies would come to us as individual entities. A mid-market healthcare business here, a logistics firm there, a SaaS company somewhere else — all sitting in the same fund, all buying Microsoft licences, all insuring similar fleets, all contracting for HR software. And every single one of them was negotiating alone. It was like watching a room full of people each trying to move a piano up the stairs individually, refusing to acknowledge the others exist.
The opportunity wasn’t incremental. It was structural. And I realised it couldn’t be solved as an add-on feature to a spend analytics tool. It needed to be the whole product, built specifically for the PE ecosystem. That’s Mulberri.
"Every portfolio company was negotiating alone. It was like watching a room full of people each trying to move a piano up the stairs individually, refusing to acknowledge the others exist."
On the mechanics of group leverage
Let’s get specific. When you talk about group procurement leverage for PE, what does that actually mean in practice? What categories move the needle most?
The principle is elegantly simple even if the execution is complex. A PE fund might have, say, fifteen portfolio companies. Those fifteen businesses — taken individually — are mid-sized buyers in any supplier’s eyes. Taken together, they may represent a spend volume that puts them in a completely different tier. We’re not talking percentage-point savings. We’re often talking about step-change reductions in unit economics.
The categories that respond most dramatically are the ones with high volume and relatively standardised specifications: SaaS and cloud infrastructure, corporate insurance, professional services like legal and audit, HR and benefits platforms, fleet and logistics, telecoms, and energy. These are areas where supplier pricing is highly elastic to volume, and where most portfolio companies are genuinely leaving significant money on the table.
Beyond pure price, there’s the contract intelligence angle. When we aggregate demand across a fund, we can also standardise contract terms, establish preferred supplier programmes, and build ongoing leverage that compounds over time. That’s not a one-time saving — it’s a structural improvement to how a portfolio buys.
On PE value creation
PE firms obsess over EBITDA. Help me understand the value creation maths here for a GP looking at their next fund.
This is where the conversation gets genuinely exciting, because the arithmetic is compelling. A pound of cost saving falls directly to EBITDA — there’s no revenue recognition lag, no go-to-market investment required, no market risk. Contrast that with a pound of incremental revenue, which typically arrives after significant cost and delay, and only a fraction of which makes it to the EBITDA line.
Now apply an exit multiple to that EBITDA improvement. If a fund is exiting businesses at, say, ten times EBITDA, every million pounds of annualised cost saving we deliver through group procurement creates ten million pounds of enterprise value. That’s a multiplier that most operating partners understand viscerally the moment it’s put in those terms.
What Mulberri enables a GP to say to their LPs is: we have a systematic, repeatable programme that begins generating measurable EBITDA improvement within weeks of acquisition. Not promises — a programme with supplier agreements already in place, a playbook that’s been executed before, and a platform that surfaces the opportunity and tracks the delivery. That’s a differentiated value creation narrative in a market where those are increasingly rare.
"Every million pounds of annualised cost saving we deliver through group procurement creates ten million pounds of enterprise value at exit. That's a multiplier that operating partners understand viscerally."
On the SaaSrooms partnership
Tell me about the partnership with SaaSrooms. Why that collaboration specifically, and what does it unlock for Mulberri and your PE clients?
SaaSrooms was a natural fit, honestly. One of the largest and most consistently underestimated cost centres across PE portfolios is software — specifically SaaS. Every portfolio company has accumulated a sprawling stack over time. Some of it’s mission-critical, some of it’s redundant, a surprising amount of it nobody’s even aware they’re paying for. And almost none of it has been procured with any real supplier leverage.
SaaSrooms has built exceptional capability in exactly this space — benchmarking SaaS spend, renegotiating contracts, identifying licence waste, and consolidating supplier relationships. Their data intelligence on vendor pricing is genuinely best-in-class. When you combine that with Mulberri’s group aggregation model across a PE portfolio, you create something the market hasn’t seen before: the ability to bring coordinated, data-backed, multi-entity negotiating power to bear on every major software vendor a portfolio touches.
For a PE firm, this is significant. Software is often their second or third largest indirect spend category, and it’s the one that’s grown fastest over the past decade without commensurate governance. We can walk into a portfolio today, understand the full software landscape within days, and begin delivering savings that are material at both the portfolio company level and the fund level.
On lessons from Simfoni
What did Simfoni teach you that directly shaped how you’ve built Mulberri? What would you do differently, or what did you carry forward?
Simfoni taught me that procurement technology without business context is a feature, not a solution. The most sophisticated spend analytics platform in the world still requires humans to make decisions, secure buy-in, manage supplier relationships, and drive organisational change. The technology amplifies human judgement — it doesn’t replace it.
I’ve carried that lesson directly into Mulberri. We’re not selling software for its own sake. We’re building a programme — a combination of supplier relationships, market intelligence, a managed process, and yes, technology — that GPs and operating partners can actually deploy and demonstrate returns from. The platform supports the programme; the programme drives the value.
What I’d do differently? I’d have been even more ruthless about focus earlier. At Simfoni we served a broad universe of enterprise clients with diverse needs. With Mulberri, we are laser-focused on PE. That specificity means we can build supplier agreements structured around how PE portfolios work, develop integrations that align to how fund managers report, and speak the language of operating partners rather than procurement managers. It makes us more useful to fewer people — and that’s exactly the right trade-off.
On the market & the future
Where do you see group procurement for PE in five years? Is this a niche service or does it become standard infrastructure for how funds operate?
I believe this becomes table-stakes for any GP serious about operational value creation. We’re already seeing the leading funds internalise the logic — the ones who are winning on operational performance rather than financial engineering alone are the ones building systematic, repeatable programmes across their portfolios. Group procurement is the most immediately quantifiable part of that.
In five years, I think you’ll see this function embedded into the acquisition playbook the same way financial due diligence or management assessment is today. From day one of ownership, there will be a group procurement programme activating. The portfolio company gets immediate EBITDA benefit; the GP gets a differentiated value creation story; the LPs get demonstrable returns that aren’t solely market-dependent.
And with the SaaSrooms partnership evolving, we’ll be pushing deeper into the technology spend frontier — AI tooling, data infrastructure, security software — categories where spend is accelerating and where coordinated buying power is virtually non-existent today. The opportunity ahead of us is enormous, and I think we’re genuinely early.
"In five years, group procurement becomes table-stakes — embedded into the acquisition playbook from day one of ownership, the same way financial due diligence is today."
Closing thoughts
Final question. For a GP or operating partner reading this who’s intrigued but perhaps sceptical — what’s your ask of them?
My ask is simple: give us one portfolio company and thirty days. Let us analyse the spend, show you where the group opportunity sits, and model what a portfolio-wide programme would deliver. We’ll do that diagnostic without obligation, because we’re confident that when you see the numbers, the conversation changes completely.
Scepticism is healthy — this industry has seen enough snake oil. But the maths of collective purchasing is not a theory; it’s arithmetic. And the structural advantages of a fund that owns multiple businesses and can aggregate their demand are real, durable, and almost entirely untapped by most GPs today.
The firms that act on this early will build a genuine competitive advantage. The ones who wait will eventually follow — but they’ll have left years of value on the table. I’d rather be in the first camp. And I’d like more GPs to join us there.
Philip Allouche is CEO of SaaSrooms Tech Spend Management, the specialist platform helping businesses and PE portfolios benchmark, renegotiate and optimise their technology spend.
Mulberri is a group procurement platform built exclusively for private equity, enabling GPs and operating partners to aggregate portfolio-wide demand and deliver measurable EBITDA improvement. Mulberri’s partnership with SaaSrooms brings specialist technology spend intelligence and SaaS renegotiation expertise to the programme.
