Singleton-raised, now Newcastle-based Andre Pinkowski and Chris Holmes initially worked on mobile app development before starting a procurement consultancy firm, Single Cell, in Canberra.

When their clients - including councils, banks and federal and state government departments - began asking for bespoke, strategic contract management systems, they developed Portt.

The Portt platform is, says Mr Pinkowski, "essentially a way to plan, buy and then manage large or complex goods, services and capital engagement."

"Whether there are legislative requirements or it's more commercial outcomes and strategic requirements, our system allows companies to plan, evaluate and award contracts and then manage those contracts and suppliers, so it's an end-to-end process," he said.

One Portt client is NSW Health and its local health districts, for who it brought a range of individual contracts into one centralised management platform.

Though Portt's work centres on managing strategic purchases, its remit includes spend analysis, asset management, evaluating social impact in business and supply chain risk.

"If suppliers are selling things or sourcing materials from a country that may not be ethically manufacturing, that's a direct risk to customer brands, that's modern slavery ... which is currently a big issue of consideration on boards," Mr Pinkowski says.

Portt's capital raise, led by fund manager CVC's emerging companies fund, allows it to launch the next version of its platform, which Mr Pinkowski says is "smaller and more agile" than the "one-size-fits-all" solution of giants like Oracle and SAP.

"With our consulting background, we have built a configurable product, with templates for every industry type," he said. "Our bigger [competitors] do a fantastic job but we dive much deeper in our niche in strategic contract management, we have a deeper set of features and a richer configuration settings and we can align much tighter to a customer's needs."

Once bootstrapped at every turn, Porrt can now move into new markets.

"It can put grey hairs on your head growing a business organically, so [the funding] will allow us to accelerate the development of new features and get them out to market quicker than competitors and allow us to compete at the top - locally in Australia and New Zealand and then globally in the coming years," Mr Pinkowski said.

Portt is growing its small team in Newcastle, and has Sydney and Vietnam bases.