Tropic

Liquid AI

Tropic

Tropic charges an annual subscription based on the customer's software spend under management. The platform pays for itself through savings — if Tropic helps a company save $500,000 on software renewals, the subscription cost is a fraction of that.

Some pricing includes a success fee tied to actual savings achieved.

The value proposition is mathematically clear: Tropic typically saves customers 23% on their SaaS spending. For a company spending $5 million annually on software, that's $1.15 million in savings.

Tropic's subscription fee is a small percentage of those savings, making the ROI calculation trivially obvious.

The data moat grows with every customer. Each contract that flows through Tropic adds to their pricing benchmarks database, making their negotiation intelligence more accurate for future customers.

This is a classic network effect — the more companies use Tropic, the better it works for everyone.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

Tropic

David Campbell spent years in SaaS sales and noticed something absurd: companies buying software almost never negotiated. They'd receive a quote, maybe push back slightly, and sign.

Meanwhile, the vendor knew exactly what discount they could offer because they had data from thousands of deals. The information asymmetry was massive — and it always favored the seller.

Campbell founded Tropic in 2020 to flip that asymmetry. The core insight was that if you aggregate pricing data from thousands of SaaS contracts across hundreds of companies, you can tell any buyer exactly what fair market price looks like.

Basically, "Company X is charging you $50 per user for this tier, but companies your size typically pay $32." That data-driven approach turns every negotiation from guesswork into science.

The timing was perfect. Post-COVID, companies were drowning in SaaS subscriptions.

The average mid-market company uses 100-200 software tools. CFOs started demanding visibility into software spend, and finance teams had no tools to manage it.

Tropic stepped into that gap with a platform that combined procurement automation with AI-powered negotiation intelligence.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

Tropic

Tropic grew by selling to CFOs with a message they couldn't resist: "we will literally save you more money than we cost." In a market where every other tool adds to the tech stack cost, Tropic reduces it. That positioning is powerful during economic downturns when CFOs are cutting budgets.

Customer success stories spread quickly. When a finance leader saves $500K on software renewals using Tropic, they tell other finance leaders.

The procurement community is tight-knit, and word travels fast at CFO conferences and finance Slack communities.

The managed services component creates stickiness. Tropic doesn't just provide data — their negotiators handle the actual vendor conversations.

This "done for you" model means customers don't need internal procurement expertise. Once Tropic handles your renewals, bringing the function in-house again feels like a downgrade.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

Tropic

The procurement software market is getting crowded. Vendr, Zylo, Productiv, and Sastrify all target SaaS spend management from different angles.

Differentiation is challenging when every vendor claims to save customers money on software purchases.

Scaling the negotiation services team is operationally complex. Unlike pure software companies that scale with zero marginal cost, Tropic's managed negotiation service requires trained humans.

Each new customer needs real people conducting real vendor negotiations. Balancing human-led services with AI automation is an ongoing challenge.

Vendor pushback is real. As procurement platforms become more common, SaaS vendors are adjusting their pricing strategies to account for aggressive negotiation.

Some vendors have started offering "non-negotiable" pricing tiers or adjusting discount structures. The more successful Tropic becomes, the more vendors adapt their tactics.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

Tropic

Tropic Procurement Platform — the core system for managing the entire software purchasing lifecycle from request through approval, negotiation, and renewal. Tropic Intelligence — AI-powered pricing benchmarks from thousands of real SaaS contracts, showing customers exactly what fair market price looks like for any software vendor.

Tropic Negotiation Services — a team of professional negotiators who handle vendor negotiations on behalf of customers, armed with Tropic's pricing data. Tropic Spend Management — dashboards and analytics showing total software spend, upcoming renewals, redundant tools, and savings opportunities.

Tropic Intake — automated request workflows that route software purchase requests through the right approval chains.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

Tropic

Insight Partners led the Series B. Canapi Ventures was an early investor.

8VC and other venture firms participated in growth rounds. The company has raised approximately $105 million total across multiple rounds.

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.