Scale

Scale is a Nairobi-based provider of digital procurement software for organisations of varying size. Its positioning is as a governed execution layer that sits above a customer's ERP: the platform handles the pre-purchase-order stages of procurement — intake of requisitions, approval routing, sourcing events, evaluation and award — while the customer's ERP remains authoritative for purchase order creation, receipting, invoicing and payment. The company describes the product as "non-posting by design," meaning it does not write to the financial ledger.

The two entry modules are Scale Requisitions, an intake and approval layer with routing by category, budget, threshold, department or project and status visibility for requesters, and Scale RFx, an end-to-end sourcing module supporting RFIs, RFQs and RFPs with controlled invitations, clarifications, submissions, weighted scoring, evaluation panels, negotiation, award approvals and an exportable "Decision Pack" documenting how an award decision was made. Additional modules cover budget and spend control, catalogue and contract governance, supplier prequalification and performance tracking, purchase orders, goods received notes, invoice management and three-way matching, supplier portal access, role-based access control and SSO. Compliance-oriented features referenced include ODPC (Kenyan data protection) and tax compliance, plus supplier diversity targeting and impact tracking for businesses owned by women, youth and persons with disabilities.

The company also runs a supplier-side offering: vendors can create free accounts, discover tenders, and prepare, manage and submit bid responses to buyers on the platform. Earlier product messaging framed the company as building an "Africa's Trust Trade Network," with verification and rating of buyers and suppliers, reuse of existing trust relationships to reduce due diligence effort, and trust data intended to be usable by buyers, suppliers and financial institutions for trade financing.

Business model

Two-sided software business serving buying organisations and their suppliers. Buyer-side procurement teams subscribe to the platform's requisition, sourcing and supplier-management modules, activating further modules as their procurement maturity increases; suppliers register on the platform to find and respond to tenders.

Usage-based software pricing described as "pay for what you use," with no set-up fees, hidden costs or complex contracts. Suppliers can discover tenders for free and pay only for the bids they respond to. Prospective buyers are offered a 30-day demo/free trial and a four-week paid-value pilot.

Traction

The site cites use by named Kenyan organisations, with testimonials attributed to a procurement manager at Nation Media Group PLC, a partner at Oxygène MCL and a business development manager at inable.org, and states that over 5,000 suppliers are on the platform alongside buyer organisations across different industries.

Latest developments

Current site messaging repositions the product from a broad procurement suite toward a narrower "pre-PO governance" layer built around two entry modules — Scale Requisitions and Scale RFx — with staged ERP integration and a four-week pilot as the standard onboarding path.