Equipme Lets Employees Self-Serve Equipment With Budget Controls Set by HR

01 /The Concept

Equipme is solving a problem that sounds mundane but turns out to be genuinely painful at scale: getting employees the tools and services they need to do their jobs, without drowning HR, procurement, and finance departments in paperwork.

The platform functions as a self-service marketplace where employees browse and purchase equipment and services on the company's dime. Administrators set category permissions and spending limits by role, optionally require approval workflows, and get a full dashboard showing what's been bought, by whom, and how budgets are tracking. Third-party vendors connect to the platform and manage their own storefronts – Equipme is the marketplace layer, not the merchant.

What makes this more than just a procurement portal is the rental model at its core. Employees don't purchase equipment outright – they lease it. That means no capital expenditure on company balance sheets, no depreciation write-downs, and straightforward return logistics when someone leaves. For remote-first companies managing laptops, monitors, and office chairs across a dozen cities, the operational difference is significant.

The onboarding integration is equally smart. Connect Equipme to an HR system, and new hires automatically receive a starter kit of approved equipment on day one – without a single email to the procurement team. Employees can then expand their setup within their permitted categories.

Pricing sits at €199/month for up to 100 active subscriptions and €599/month for up to 300. Larger organizations get custom quotes. Vendors likely pay a revenue share on transactions. Companies that want to white-label the portal under their own branding pay an additional €299/month.

Around 500 companies – primarily in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland – are currently on the platform. Equipme has raised $3.8M to fuel expansion into new markets.

02 /Why It Matters

Equipme is not operating alone in this space. Zip, [covered here](/review/bolshie-kompanii-bolshie-dengi), built an analogous procurement and approval platform, graduated Y Combinator in 2020, and went on to raise $26M and then $43M – reaching a $1.2B valuation. Firstbase, [reviewed previously](/review/oni-rabotajut-vy-zarabatyvaete), focuses specifically on equipping remote workers anywhere in the world, and has pulled in $65.1M. Nornorm, [covered in this review](/review/prosto-vozmjom-bolshoj-rynok), took a single vertical – office furniture under a subscription model – and raised €110M. Lumos, [reviewed here](/review/100-vozmozhnostej-sjekonomit-tret-deneg), does the same for cloud software licenses and has raised $20M.

Two structural trends explain why the category keeps attracting capital. The first is the shift from ownership to rental for corporate assets. Companies increasingly prefer predictable monthly costs, cleaner balance sheets, and the operational flexibility to return equipment when headcount changes – all of which the as-a-service model enables. The term "XaaS" (Everything-as-a-Service) has even become industry shorthand for this, visible in Equipme's own tagline.

The second trend is the decentralization of procurement. Traditional models centralize purchasing decisions at the administrative level. The new model pushes that authority down to individual employees, with administrators setting guardrails rather than making every call. This shift tracks almost perfectly with the normalization of remote work: when you can't physically supervise someone in an office, you adapt by trusting them with bounded autonomy instead.

The two trends reinforce each other, and both are still early.

03 /Opportunities

The broadest direction here is building corporate XaaS platforms – converting anything a company currently buys or manages into a rentable, tracked, employee-initiated service with a software layer on top.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this extends beyond hardware and software to people themselves. "Staffing as a service" platforms are already attracting real investment: Techmate (technical support specialists), Lawclerk (associate attorneys for law firms), A.Team (on-demand product development teams), SellX (B2B sales reps), Bite Ninja (remote cashiers for drive-throughs), Scaleup Finance (fractional CFOs for startups), and Superside and Awesomic (design capacity on demand) have collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars on exactly this model.

The endgame – or at least the direction of travel – is a company that is little more than a core team of founders and key strategists, with everything else subscribed to and managed via software. One unified contractor providing "company as a service" is an extreme framing, but the individual components are already investable businesses. The most defensible entry point is finding a category that is currently managed through spreadsheets, email chains, and manual approvals – and building the software layer that automates it with appropriate controls.