Cuba It is expanding its ambitions in the field of artificial intelligence through the acquisition of… Tonkina deal aimed at making global procurement and trade workflows more autonomous from order to payment.
Cloud native spend management company On Wednesday (May 21), it said it had acquired Tonkinan AI-driven ingestion and coordination platform used by corporate procurement, legal, and internal services teams. Cuba said the deal enhances its ability to offer “agent-as-a-service” capabilities across its network of more than 3,500 buyers and 10 million suppliers.
This acquisition gives Coupa another layer of workflow automation at a time when companies are trying to reduce manual handoffs in purchasing, supplier management and payments. Tonkean offers a natural language interface that allows users to submit and track requests, as well as a no-code process builder and more than 250 native connectors that can sit around existing client systems without requiring a massive copy-and-replace technology overhaul.
The Tonkean platform has helped increase user adoption by 2.2 times, reduce cycle times by 50% and save operations teams more than 30 hours per week, Cuba said. The company also said Tonkean adds an advanced multi-agent and cross-agent coordination framework, allowing AI agents to execute more complex workflows across buyers, suppliers and internal teams.
The move is part of a larger acquisition strategy. Tonkean is Coupa’s fourth strategic acquisition linked to its dealer commerce network vision, following Cirtuo, Scoutbee and Rossum. Together, Cuba says, these assets add category management, supplier intelligence, document reading capabilities, and now workflow orchestration to its spend management platform.
“This is a deliberate strategic step towards building the No. 1 agent trade network,” he said. Salvatore Lombardochief product and technology officer at Coupa.
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The implications for CFOs, CPOs, and payments leaders are clear: AI in the back office is moving beyond recommendations and dashboards. Coupa is trying to build a system that can read documents, route orders, coordinate approvals, connect suppliers and execute parts of the transaction flow. This can make the purchasing process faster and more consistent, but it also raises the bar for clean data, governance, and trust in automated workflows.
PYMNTS has tracked Coupa’s push toward autonomous spend management and AI-driven procurement. In February, PYMNTS reported Coupa has brought agentic AI features to its spend management platformadding more than 100 features aimed at achieving operational efficiency and supplier collaboration. In May, I covered PYMNTS Coupa’s acquisition of Cirtuowhich has added AI-powered category management to its roadmap. In October, PYMNTS reported Coupa has added four AI agents to its spend management platformincluding analytics tools, bid evaluation, order creation, and cognitive support. The Tonkean deal extends the same arc, moving Coupa from AI-assisted spend management to more coordinated, agent-driven trading.
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