MSIV Invests in Marin’s Stackpack
Q&A with Founder & CEO Sara Wyman
Thursday, May 15, 2025 from Belvedere, CA
In 2021, Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures launched the North Bay’s first regional venture capital fund and began deploying capital into Marin + Sonoma’s most promising startup companies.
Today, we are excited to share details around our investment in Stackpack, the first intelligent Vendor Stack Management platform helping companies regain control over their growing network of third-party vendors.
Businesses today are powered by a vast web of providers, from software platforms to AI tools to contractors to other managed services. Yet most teams still manage these critical partnerships with spreadsheets, while traditional vendor management software platforms have not kept pace with best-in-class AI capabilities.
With Stackpack, finance and IT teams get a single source of truth for all third-party vendors — automatically surfacing renewal dates, contract owners, shadow IT, compliance gaps, and savings opportunities. The platform then uses AI to uncover blind spots and help teams turn vendor sprawl into cost savings.
Why We Invested
Over $475 billion is spent each year on third-party software and services in the U.S. alone, with an estimated 25% of it going unused. With payroll budgets shifting to a greater reliance on contractors and, more recently, AI expenses, a lack of transparency in renewal dates and pricing makes it much more difficult to budget and forecast.
Today it would be unthinkable for a sophisticated business to manage their employees or customers in spreadsheets, yet this has persisted with vendors which are taking up a growing percentage of company budgets. Stackpack is building the platform for this new era and is creating a data-first enterprise, understanding that providing key insights and automating actions from those insights is critical to engendering long-term customer loyalty.
Stackpack Founder & CEO Sara Wyman is a veteran of accomplished startups Etsy and Affirm, where she encountered the problem firsthand of dealing with the chaos and cost of undermanaged vendors. MSIV is joining leading venture investors in a $6.3 million financing round that Stackpack announced on May 13.
Just months after launch, Stackpack is already managing over 10,500 vendors and $510 million in spend across more than 50 customers.
MSIV Founder & Managing Partner Zachary Kushel sat down with Stackpack Founder & CEO Sara Wyman to discuss the importance of companies gaining a firm grasp on their vendor stack and her vision moving forward in leading Stackpack.
Stackpack CEO Sara Wyman
ZK: Sara, when did the light bulb go off for you with the idea for Stackpack?
SW: I was fortunate enough to be an early-stage employee at Etsy and Affirm, two very successful startup companies, and I noticed that even though they were well-run, they had a hard time organizing their vendors – the software, services, contractors, and ad spend that powered their businesses. As these companies scaled, they kept spending more money which required hiring procurement teams and buying expensive software, and they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to solve a problem that could have been solved early on had the right platform been in place.
I also saw over the past few years companies pushing payroll budgets into AI tools, contractors and specialists, which means even more spend that needs to be properly tracked. The platform did not exist to manage all of this, especially for small and medium sized businesses, and I knew there was a massive opportunity to move these companies from spreadsheets into a smart platform, so I set out to build what became Stackpack.
ZK: Tell me more about the product vision for Stackpack – what does Stackpack do for a CFO in terms of efficiency and insights?
SW: The first thing is allowing full insight into what was previously a fragmented picture. In most companies, tools are duplicated, contracts are lost, and some vendors are owned by employees who have left the company – we’re now able to take all of that data and surface it in one place, and once we have all of the data, we can help our customers ensure they never miss a renewal or go over budget again. That results in immediate cost savings. The second piece is helping with compliance and legal blind spots – we track which vendors touch sensitive data and which data new AI tools have access to.
With all of this in place, we can help companies make smart decisions around which tools and services to use and help them discover and evaluate these options. Compared to legacy vendor management systems, where you add every single vendor one-by-one, and where it can take months to onboard, we connect with your accounting and ERP software and literally set up our customers in minutes. I’m proud that our platform is light and delightful to use, and because our cost is so low, CFOs see ROI in the first month they implement Stackpack.
ZK: With AI entrenching deeper into the C-suite, how do you see Stackpack leveraging AI to solve this vendor madness?
SW: AI is core to our platform and will touch every aspect of vendor management from discovery to evaluation to approvals. As our customer base grows, so will our data set, and this density of buyers means we will be uniquely positioned to help customers make smart decisions on their vendors.
As an example, let’s say a company comes to us in need of a new HRIS system. We will know which systems are likely to be a good fit based on their vertical and company size, and we’ll know what a fair price is because we see what their peers are paying, which will save them time picking a new vendor. With approvals, once we know a company’s policies, we can set up automatic processes to move purchasers through the buying funnel much more quickly. These AI capabilities will allow us to achieve our mission of connecting buyers and sellers at the right time with the right product at the right price point.
Sara speaking to 200+ North Bay business leaders at the 2025 NBBJ Economic Outlook Summit
ZK: That is such a gamechanger. What are the most important lessons you took from working at Etsy and Affirm and how have they helped inform your leadership style at Stackpack?
SW: I feel very lucky to have worked at those two companies – they had very distinct cultures, but what both had in common was the quality of the teams. I experienced firsthand what it was like to have very strong teammates all around me, so when building Stackpack from scratch, it was important that we set a very high bar when it comes to talent and hiring. We want to make sure every person we bring into this organization helps round out our overall skillset in some way.
The other thing that jumps out is the sheer velocity with which both of those companies scaled. I learned that it’s important to set a very aggressive pace and to raise the bar on what you can accomplish each week. If you keep pushing higher and higher, goals that once seemed out of reach become attainable.
Stackpack’s North Bay team and MSIV leadership at the 2024 MSIV Fall Party
ZK: How did you wind up in the North Bay, and what excites you about the potential of the growing Marin + Sonoma startup community?
SW: I am a relatively recent arrival, having moved to Belvedere two years ago from San Francisco. I was so excited to get out of the fog and into beautiful Marin! Much of our core team is based in the North Bay, and there is something special about operating in a tight-knit community that allows us to get a lot more done. I’ve seen the value of partnering with MSIV in such a short period of time, with this local investment leading to a customer introduction straight away that has become a very important partner and reference customer for us.
I’ve been so impressed with the high caliber of founders who want to build startups here – the MSIV portfolio CEO dinners have allowed me to build fast relationships with founders who are neighbors, and we are all helping each other with everything from raising capital to sharing marketing strategies. I love how many people have come up to me at MSIV gatherings saying they want to help us – I’m so appreciative and it’s why I’m so excited for all that is ahead for this community as it strengthens and grows in the months and years ahead.
