Meet Our Talent Leadership

At Coupa, our people make the difference. From optimizing complex systems to driving new ideas that power global innovation, we believe in celebrating those who step up, lean in, and go beyond what’s expected. To recognize those exceptional efforts, the Coupa India Leadership Team introduced the Extra Mile Award, a quarterly honor that highlights individuals who demonstrate ownership, creativity, and impact. These are the Coupanians who set new standards for excellence and inspire others to do the same. This quarter, we’re proud to recognize three exceptional engineers—Gyanendra Ojha, Pritesh Mantri, and Akshay Sable—whose technical brilliance and collaborative spirit are helping us build smarter, more resilient systems to shape the future of spend management.

In the world of engineering here at Coupa, I’m reminded of one of our core beliefs: powerful systems should still feel simple. Yet as organizations grow, even everyday tasks such as requesting equipment, submitting a purchase, or finding the right workflow can become more complex than they should. Tracking back to early 2024, our team asked a simple question with big implications: What if we could make the user experience for these requests effortless? What started as one little idea has grown into Smart Intake & Orchestration (SIO), a reimagined way for people to navigate requests across the Coupa platform. How It All Began Coupa has been scaling fast. With more capabilities and more global customers, complexity naturally grows too. We realized that incremental fixes weren’t going to be enough. We needed to transform the entire end-to-end journey. Our goal was clear: Make every request simple, intuitive, and human, regardless of the user or the workflow behind it. Building Something New Together I joined the project early and quickly saw its potential impact. It became one of the most collaborative efforts of my career with Product, UX, engineering, and cross-functional partners all coming together with a shared purpose. We created a flexible, scalable experience framework that supports users today and grows with them for tomorrow. This wasn’t just innovation to gain business efficiency. It was innovation rooted in empathy for our customers using our platform every day. Facing Challenges and Growing from Them With any ambitious initiative, there were moments where decisions had to be made with limited precedent. We made decisions with limited precedent, tight timelines, and alignment across many teams. Some key challenges included: Balancing speed with thoughtful execution Experimenting while staying grounded Ensuring teams worldwide rallied around a shared vision Prioritizing customer needs with long-term strategy in mind These challenges made us better and reminded us to bring people in early, test ideas quickly, and keep the user experience at the heart of everything. Launching, Learning, and Iterating We officially introduced Smart Intake & Orchestration at our Coupa Inspire customer event in May 2025. Since then, we’ve partnered closely with customers to refine, evolve, and expand the capabilities. Today, many Coupa customers are already using SIO, with more on the horizon. Here is a demo and overview of SIO for those interested in learning more. It’s just the beginning and the momentum is exciting.