Online procurement comes of age with launch of mondus.com

mondus.com, an Internet-based procurement service, has launched today promising to streamline buying for small businesses.

The company is targetting the UK, US and German markets, and claims its service will also benefit suppliers helping them to reach new customers by using mondus.com as a virtual shop front, often in addition to their own sites.

The service is not only aimed at users looking for IT hardware and software, but any small business looking for necessities such as stationery, furniture or even couriers.

Rouzbeh Pirouz, CEO, mondus.com, told Silicon.com: "It's a lot quicker, a lot easier, and buyers can also save a lot of money, as opposed to doing it through traditional means. We've done a lot of focus groups to find out what people want, and we know of no one else in Europe trying to do the same thing for small businesses."

For buyers, the service is free. Suppliers have to pay £1 for each tender bid, and a fee of between 0.5 and 5 per cent per successful transaction.

Stuart Hamilton, innovations director at Axon Group, an ecommerce consultancy and SAP partner, said: "It looks like everyone's got an e-procurement portal in their heads right now, and for non-production goods and services, which are less critical and less strategic, they will provide benefits for companies."

Duncan Brown, director of research, Ovum, said: "This is consistent with the general trend of niche portals, and the portal is itself a market-led answer to the problem - 'Where is anything'. It's probably better than trawling through all the Internet or the Yellow Pages."

mondus has received $12m in venture capital funding from Eden Capital, and $1.7m from 3i. CEO Pirouz and co-founder Alexander Straub met while studying at Oxford in the mid-90s as Rhodes Scholars.