By Arowolo Samuel
Procurement is often the silent engine behind business performance.
In Nigeria, however, it has long been sidelined, treated as a reactive task buried beneath chaotic paperwork and slow approvals.
For growing enterprises, the real bottleneck isn’t ambition, it’s the absence of systems that scale. In this overlooked space, Vender is quietly rewriting the rules.
Guided by the operational foresight of co-founder Stella Eshett, Vender is helping Nigerian businesses shift procurement from a transactional chore into a strategic growth lever.
Her work goes beyond building software, it’s about introducing discipline where disorder once thrived, and clarity where confusion previously reigned.
She understood early on that for companies to grow sustainably, procurement must evolve from fragmented processes into structured, data-driven decisions.
Her vision for the company was shaped by a simple but powerful observation: businesses don’t struggle for ideas; they struggle for execution. And without control over what they buy, from whom, and at what cost, execution falters. The company was designed not to replace human judgment, but to support it, offering flexible workflows that mirror real-life business operations, not generic automation templates.
The platform’s core strength lies in how it adapts to the rhythms of different industries. Whether it’s a manufacturing firm needing robust vendor oversight or a creative agency managing irregular project purchases, Vender molds itself to fit the operational contours of each business.
She ensured that from day one, the product respected complexity rather than masking it, because real procurement decisions are rarely linear.
But the company is more than a digital tool; it’s a mindset shift. By centralizing requests, approvals, and spend analytics, it empowers finance and operations teams to detect patterns, manage risk, and negotiate smarter. Her contribution isn’t just technical, it’s cultural.
She is instilling a new respect for procurement in companies that once treated it as a last-minute task. In her hands, it becomes infrastructure, quietly powerful, fundamentally necessary.
The company’s growing footprint is also shaping conversations around enterprise discipline, vendor accountability, and the role of women in enterprise tech. As a founder, she stands out not only for what she’s built, but how she’s done it, with precision, realism, and deep respect for the day-to-day challenges of Nigerian businesses.
In a market where internal inefficiencies often cripple growth, Vender is proving that the real edge isn’t always in the product or the pitch, it’s in the process. And with Eshett, that process is being redefined for a new generation of businesses that refuse to scale with chaos.