The Australian Software That Was Three Years Ahead of Its Buyer
The VendorPanel team. In 2021, VendorPanel acquired Consensus Award-winning eBMS Nimblex, bringing its technology, more than 50 customers and the entire nimblex team into the business. James Leathem (Founder & CEO), David Bubner (COO) and Matt Clyne (Chief Revenue Officer).
eBMS Pty Ltd | nimblex | Consensus Award Winner 2014
When eBMS won a Consensus Award for nimblex in 2014, the Australian software company had developed something that was beginning to attract the attention of major government and enterprise customers: a highly configurable platform capable of digitising complex business processes without requiring organisations to build expensive bespoke systems.
Seven years later, that technology would become the subject of a strategic acquisition. Three years after that, the company that acquired it would merge with a global procurement software business backed by one of the world's major technology investment firms.
Today, that journey leads to Unimarket, a global source-to-pay technology company serving hundreds of organisations across Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada.
Building nimblex
Founded by Bert Myburgh, eBMS developed nimblex as a low-code platform capable of configuring workflows and business processes around the requirements of individual organisations.
The technology found a particularly strong market in procurement, contract management, governance and risk — areas where large organisations often needed to accommodate complicated approval structures, policies and regulatory requirements.
By the time nimblex's success attracted an acquirer, its customers included the Governments of South Australia and Western Australia, Melbourne Airport, Yarra Valley Water and local councils in both Australia and New Zealand. More than 50 organisations were using the platform.
It was an impressive customer base for an Australian-developed enterprise software product.
But what happened next provides a much clearer indication of how valuable the underlying technology had become.
VendorPanel buys nimblex
In July 2021, Melbourne procurement technology company VendorPanel acquired eBMS Nimblex.
VendorPanel already had its own established procurement platform, used by governments and businesses to manage sourcing and supplier engagement. It wasn't simply acquiring nimblex to add customers.
It wanted what eBMS had built.
VendorPanel CEO James Leathem said acquiring nimblex would fast-track the company's product roadmap by at least three to four years. The acquisition gave VendorPanel nimblex's low-code technology, its customer base and an experienced development team. All nimblex employees joined VendorPanel following the transaction, including founder Bert Myburgh.
The technology began being integrated almost immediately. nimblex Contract Management was connected with VendorPanel's sourcing platform, with further integrations underway as the businesses combined their capabilities.
For technology first recognised by Consensus seven years earlier, the acquisition was significant validation: another software company calculated that buying nimblex was more valuable than spending the next three or four years attempting to recreate its capabilities.
The story gets bigger
The VendorPanel acquisition wasn't the end of the journey.
On 9 October 2024, VendorPanel announced that it was merging with Unimarket, a global provider of procurement and spend-management technology founded in Auckland in 2005.
Unimarket had already established operations across Australia, New Zealand and the United States and had received a majority growth investment from global technology investment firm Accel-KKR to accelerate product innovation and strategic acquisitions.
The 2024 merger brought VendorPanel's source-to-contract capabilities together with Unimarket's procure-to-pay technology to create a broader end-to-end source-to-pay platform.
At the time of the merger, the combined business served nearly 450 customers across the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, spanning government, education, healthcare, energy, transport, utilities and the corporate sector.
VendorPanel has since transitioned under the Unimarket brand, creating one unified company and technology platform. Unimarket now describes itself as supporting hundreds of organisations internationally, with customers including universities, governments, healthcare organisations and major institutions across multiple countries.
From nimblex to Unimarket
The names on the building may have changed, but the lineage is important.
eBMS built nimblex. Consensus recognised it in 2014. VendorPanel acquired the business and its technology in 2021. VendorPanel then merged with Unimarket in 2024, creating a substantially larger international procurement technology group.
For a piece of Australian enterprise software, that's an impressive journey.
What began as a configurable Australian business-process platform became technology used by state governments, airports, utilities and councils. It was then acquired because its capabilities could save another technology company years of development, before becoming part of a global procurement software business operating across four countries.
More than a decade after its Consensus Award, the technology story that began with eBMS and nimblex had travelled a very long way from where it started.