Israel’s Nipendo, a B2B trading partners’ cloud that its author fancies is a disruptive social business network, has gotten an $8 million B round led by Horizon Ventures.

The investment should let the start-up move to the US and expand into America. It has already moved its headquarters to Boston.

Its Beehive SaaS widgetry is supposed to cut costs.

Horizon manages the private technology and Internet investments of Li Ka- shing, an early investor in Facebook, Spotify and Siri. Existing investor Tel Aviv-based Magma Venture Partners participated in the round. The A round it provided was reportedly good for $4 million.

Nipendo says it aims to remove supply chain bottlenecks caused by manual or aging processes as well as long-standing legacy systems that have traditionally relied on EDI protocols, value-added networks or extranets, all of which are time-consuming, costly and burdensome.

Its Supplier Cloud lets enterprises collaborate with trading partners and automate the PO-to-payment lifecycle – from order receipt to shipping/ receiving, tracking electronic invoices, ensuring 100% reconciliation and accuracy, all the way to payment.

Once connected to Nipendo’s network, suppliers and trading partners can automatically communicate with other members, eliminating the need for lengthy custom programming for every new supplier connection.

Nipendo’s cloud reduces costly errors and discrepancies in the PO-to- payment process, accelerating time-to-market, enhancing data quality and helping enterprises achieve greater efficiency and profitability.

It has attracted 3,500 high-tech, defense, healthcare, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, banking, and food and beverage users including Pfizer, HP, Lilly, IBM, Office Depot and Teva.

The company says manual paper-based processes cost businesses around the world millions of dollars a year in direct procurement costs. With the cost of doing business for both buyers and suppliers approximately 2% of the total purchasing volume, a business spending $1.5 billion in purchasing volume, for example, will incur approximately $30 million in overhead because of existing process and transaction inefficiencies.

Nipendo is supposed to saves companies up to 50% of their process costs.

The company is run by Avner Schneur, who started Emptoris, which was acquired by IBM. It will find itself competing against IBM’s Sterling Commerce and SAP’s Ariba although its integration is supposed to be faster.