Derive: simplifying Procurement & AP through integrations

The company

Derive is a cutting-edge B2B SaaS platform specializing in the automation of procurement and accounts payable workflows. By leveraging an advanced orchestration layer and a proprietary AI engine, Derive helps businesses streamline complex financial operations. Their core value proposition lies in the ability to provide a "holistic" finance solution - ensuring that procurement actions, approvals, and financial data stay perfectly in sync with a company’s primary system of record in real-time.

The Challenge

For Derive, integrations were not an optional "add-on" feature; they were a foundational requirement from day one. To automate accounts payable effectively, the platform needed to reliably push bills, read invoices, and sync charts of accounts with customer ERPs in real-time.

Initially, the team considered building native integrations in-house, starting with Xero. However, they quickly encountered the "integration trap." As a startup, Derive faced a critical resource allocation problem: every hour spent managing OAuth tokens, handling token refresh logic, and mapping various ERP edge cases was an hour taken away from developing their core AI engine and orchestration features. With the market demanding support for multiple platforms ranging from SMB tools like Xero to enterprise giants like NetSuite and Workday. Derive realized that maintaining a growing library of native integrations would eventually overwhelm their development team.

The Solution

After evaluating several unified API and iPaaS vendors (including Merge and Hot Glue), Derive chose Apideck. CTO Kogulan Ledanan noted that Apideck stood out primarily due to its superior latency and speed, which aligned with Derive’s obsession with high-quality user experience. Additionally, Apideck’s no-caching data policy was a significant advantage for compliance, as it simplified the security review process with enterprise clients by ensuring sensitive financial data was processed without being stored in a local cache.

The implementation was remarkably efficient:

• Xero: Derive went from signing up to a live production environment in just three weeks.
• Workday Finance: By partnering closely with Apideck's engineering team, they successfully launched a new Workday ERP integration in less than 90 days.
• Unexpected Wins: Beyond accounting, Derive was able to go live with a Jira Service Management integration in just two weeks, allowing their customers to trigger ticketing workflows directly from a procurement approval.

The Results

By utilizing Apideck’s Unified API, Derive has successfully reduced their development time by 70%. This efficiency has allowed them to move aggressively into both the mid-market and enterprise sectors simultaneously.

Looking toward the upcoming year, Derive plans to scale their existing Xero and Workday offerings while expanding their enterprise reach by adding Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and NetSuite connectors. Furthermore, Derive is exploring Apideck’s Bill Payments and Expenses functionalities to close the end-to-end loop for finance automation, eventually moving toward a comprehensive payments integration to further solidify their position as a leader in procurement orchestration.