Why we invested in Monq

Procurement today is no longer a back-office box-ticking exercise; it’s become one of the most strategic levers inside large organisations. When up to 75% of an organisation’s spend flows through procurement, the cost of getting a negotiation wrong (due to a missed clause, a poorly chosen supplier, a weak concession) can translate into millions in value leakage. And it happens every year. 

Numbers alone don’t fully capture the reality. Strategic negotiations are high-stakes, relationship-dense, time-pressured and emotionally charged. They require navigating internal politics, supplier psychology, market dynamics, legal nuance and a mountain of unstructured data (that rarely lives in one place).

A successful negotiation involves aligning interests, setting the right precedent, and being sufficiently prepared (and confident) to avoid being pressured into the wrong terms. Procurement teams know this better than anyone. Yet the environment they operate in has never been more complex; with increasing supply chain uncertainty, ever-changing regulation, and a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape.

In an increasingly sophisticated world, it’s tempting to be split into one of two camps; those led by gut feel, or those who rely on “the data”, the dashboards and the mountain of SaaS tools. But leading procurement teams know that it requires a marriage of the quantitative, with aspects that are hard to measure: tacit knowledge, behavioural nuance, institutional memory, precedent, context, and tone.

With the right internal context, processes and data foundation, procurement teams can now take a step up from an over-reliance on instinct or data, to intelligence-driven workflows. A system that consolidates negotiation-relevant data, models different deal structures, identifies risks and anomalies, proposes options and trade-offs, and reasons over outcomes. 

And who better to build this vision than Yasin Bostanci and Duygu Gozeler Porchet. A founding team whose careers were shaped by building from scratch inside large, ambitious, high stakes environments. 

Yasin’s path from Huawei, to Amazon, to the CEO’s Office at Revolut give him the operational discipline and velocity needed to tackle deeply complex systems. His instinct is always to redesign from first principles rather than incrementally optimise – something we observed first-hand as the business morphed from concept to working product in the first weeks after our initial meeting. His story (and upbringing) also forged an outlier level of independence, resilience and conviction. 

Duygu brings 15 years of capital markets and private banking experience across HSBC, Deutsche and Lombard Odier in North America, LatAm and the Middle East. Her GTM strength is obvious – she has a rare ability to build trust and to articulate a vision clearly. Her personal mission around building a purpose-driven organisation shapes Monq’s culture as much as the product.

We’re excited to be leading Monq’s pre-seed round and being part of a pioneering procurement platform building autonomous negotiation agents that help teams cut costs up to 40%, close deals 5x faster and better manage multimillion-dollar enterprise contracts. If you’re looking to join a team that operates with extreme ownership, no ego, and high standards, Monq is hiring across several roles.