Olive Technologies

Olive Technologies operates olive.app, a software platform for evaluating and selecting technology vendors. The product brings requirements management, stakeholder collaboration and vendor intelligence into a single workspace, allowing buying teams to define weighted requirements across departments, discover vendors in a category, collect and score vendor responses, and produce a ranked recommendation with a fit score and stakeholder-alignment measure that can be exported as an executive summary.

Platform features span RFP/RFI/RFQ creation and templates, RFP automation, discovery and planning surveys, requirements management and templates, workflow and collaboration, section and requirement numbering, software sourcing, vendor engagement, vendor pricing, vendor evaluation and comparative analysis. Decision-support capabilities include executive reporting, total cost of ownership analysis, build-vs-buy analysis and co-branding. Olive also publishes category reports and articles, such as guides to point-of-sale systems and agentic AI platforms, drawn from its own evaluation data. The platform is positioned as industry-agnostic, with material addressing hospitality and restaurants, retail and e-commerce, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and logistics, finance and banking, technology, education, energy and utilities, aerospace and consulting.

Founding story

The company traces its origin to 2018, when Chris Heard, then working in enterprise software sales, concluded after a sales meeting in Calgary that his company had won a deal despite not being the best fit for the customer, and that the buying process was structurally biased. Heard developed the idea of an AI-powered IT consultant to help buyers make unbiased technology decisions and partnered with co-founder Dan Harrison, who also had a vendor-side background, to build the platform.

Business model

Olive sells access to its evaluation platform to technology buyers and to advisory firms that run evaluations on behalf of clients. The company states it takes no money from vendors and is funded by buyer subscriptions, contrasting this with analyst-firm models funded by vendor fees.

Buyer-side subscriptions to the platform; the site states $0 is taken from vendors and advertises a free trial alongside booked demos.

Traction

The website reports more than 1,000,000 vendor responses captured across 4,200+ evaluations spanning 380+ categories and 12,000+ vendors, and claims 50% faster vendor selection and 3x more vendors assessed per RFP. Customer case studies cite Dennison & Associates (25% reduction in project time), Redhand Advisors (30% reduction in project delivery time) and Zippy's (50% shorter evaluation timelines). The company was awarded three badges in G2's Winter 2023 reports. Named customer references include Primary Residential Mortgage and Freddy's Steakburgers.

Latest developments

The current site presents Olive as an AI-native vendor evaluation workspace with AI-assisted vendor discovery, weighted requirements building, comparative scoring and exportable decision summaries, plus published category reports including a 2026 point-of-sale comparison and a guide to agentic AI platforms. Company coverage listed in mid-2024 includes articles in Forbes and Constructor Magazine.