Hotmart

Hotmart was founded in 2011 by two entrepreneurs from Minas Gerais and became a unicorn and a global platform for digital products: over US$ 15 billion in sales, 85 million people who have bought through the platform and purchases from more than 200 countries. There, suppliers are infrastructure. What Hotmart buys most is software, and if a supplier fails, the platform creators and customers rely on can fail too.

At the 23rd Procurement & Sourcing Forum, in October 2026, Débora Caruso, Procurement Manager, and Ana Andrade, Procurement Analyst at Hotmart, explained how the company went from 15 to 20 business days to a median of 6 calendar days to qualify a supplier. The full talk is in the video above.

The challenge: six areas approving in a queue

Hotmart has used Coupa as its procurement platform since 2021, and supplier qualification happened there. Before Linkana, the company dealt with:

• A sequential flow: areas approved one after the other, and a single rejection sent the supplier back to the start, even when the previous areas had already signed off;
• No confidentiality: the reason for a rejection sat in Coupa comments, visible to any requester, even when it involved an ethics issue;
• A single technology form, with 196 questions for any purchase, whether a SaaS tool or an AI vendor;
• Zero automation: not even the check between the CNPJ, Brazil’s company registration number, and bank details was automatic;
• A rigid process: exceptions had to go through large committees;
• Frustrated suppliers and requesters: qualification was the top complaint in Procurement’s NPS.

The result was 15 to 20 business days to qualify a supplier, at a company that sometimes needs to qualify an AI vendor in a single day.

At the root of the problem were six areas with veto power: Master Data, which owns supplier records, Compliance, Privacy, IT, Cyber and IAM, which handles identity and access. Every area reviewed every supplier, even when it didn’t need to. The dilemma was to involve everyone in everything and stall the process, or involve fewer areas and accept some risk.

The turning point: Procurement as the owner of qualification

In 2024, Hotmart restructured its Procurement team, which took ownership of the qualification process and brought in Linkana. Three things got the six areas to the same table:

1. A clear owner: Procurement became the owner of supplier management;

2. Active management: the Procurement team was the link between the areas and Linkana, from building the forms to the integration;

3. A win for everyone: the process became centralized and put an end to side spreadsheets.

The journey had five milestones:

• Aug 2024 to May 2025, one area at a time: each area answered four questions. What it needs to see, when it gets involved, what each category requires and how that connects with Coupa. With that, approval stopped being sequential and became simultaneous;
• Jul 2025, risk becomes a score: each area assesses the supplier in its own field, and that assessment feeds the risk score, weighted by severity. Risk also sets how often the supplier is requalified;
• Aug 2025, Coupa integration: the request starts in Coupa, qualification happens in Linkana and only the result goes back to Coupa. Anything technical or confidential stays in Linkana. Hotmart’s own Procurement team built the integration, without outside consultants, with support from Linkana’s integrations team;
• 2026, automatic approval: the automatic track, which assesses the supplier only through public database checks, starts approving without anyone having to look;
• 2027, ERP integration: Hotmart is rolling out SAP S/4HANA, and the integration will remove manual data entry.

In the category design, the technology category with 196 questions became six specific categories, such as SaaS, API and Data Center. Alongside them came categories for services, physical products, sponsorship and the automatic tracks, with 31 active categories in Portuguese and English, because Hotmart buys from all over the world. And whatever a public check already answers was removed from the form suppliers had to fill in.

Concrete results

After the rollout, Hotmart achieved:

• Qualification from 15 to 20 business days to a median of 6 calendar days, with 90% completed within 14 days;
• 3,435 registered suppliers, domestic and international, and 2,749 qualified with no pending items, under continuous monitoring;
• 1,628 qualifications in the last 12 months, 1,615 of them approved;
• 2,044 suppliers connected through the Coupa integration;
• About 2,000 suppliers with a score based on public checks.

Of those 1,628 qualifications, 850 went through the automatic track, with 90% completed within 6 calendar days. The other 778 were in categories that require technical review by the areas. That’s effort going where the risk is.

Benefits for internal areas and suppliers

According to Ana, the result went beyond Procurement:

• Trust: the team showed the company why qualification needs rigor, since Hotmart can’t have suppliers involved in money laundering or on sanctions lists;
• Visibility: requesters, who are the employees themselves, get a link to follow each qualification and see which document is pending;
• Speed: areas approve in parallel and only step in when the scope calls for it. A sponsorship doesn’t go through IT or Cyber;
• Continuous control: expiring documents and new findings, such as forced labor, arrive as alerts;
• Supplier experience: the invitation goes to more than one email address, and each team on the supplier’s side answers its own part.

Next steps and lessons learned

Hotmart is moving on three fronts: increasingly automatic tracks, the SAP integration in 2027 and continuous monitoring to meet audit requirements.

For anyone starting tomorrow, Débora left four recommendations:

• Bring the specialist areas in from the start, because they’ll get involved at some point;
• Invest in process design before configuring the tool;
• Think beyond qualification: what matters most is keeping the supplier qualified and monitored;
• Turn risk into a score before automating, to get rid of subjectivity.

Conclusion

Hotmart’s case shows that speed and governance can go together. With a clear owner, areas brought in according to the risk of each purchase and risk turned into a score, supplier qualification now keeps pace with a technology company.

In Débora Caruso’s words:

“Technology amplifies the process, but it doesn’t replace governance.”