Tim Spencer realized how complex manufacturing sourcing can be while running his e-commerce startup Markai in Asia during the pandemic.
“We had thousands of suppliers and distributed products to dozens of countries around the world,” Spencer (pictured left) told TechCrunch. His staff was overwhelmed by the manual complexity of sourcing suppliers, negotiating prices, tracking orders, and managing payments.
“I realized that I was leading this big team that was not set up for success,” he said. He sold Marukai in 2023, just as it was becoming clear that generative AI could streamline some of the most time-consuming procurement hurdles for manufacturers and distributors.
Later that year, Spencer launched Didero with McKinsey procurement veteran Lorenz Paulhuber (pictured center) and former Landis technology co-founder Tom Petit.
Didero, whose mission is to automate much of the complexity of global procurement, just raised $30 million in Series A co-led by Chemistry and Headline with participation from Microsoft’s venture fund M12.
“World trade is built on natural language communication,” Spencer said. “It’s email, WeChat, phone calls, purchase orders, and packing lists.”
Until the advent of generative AI, these pieces had to be tracked by humans, spending days chasing suppliers and manually updating systems of record. Didero claims its platform can capture that communication and autopilot large parts of the procurement workflow.
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Didero acts as an agent AI layer that sits on top of a company’s existing ERP, acting as a coordinator that reads incoming communications and automatically executes necessary updates and tasks.
“The goal is to go from ‘I need an item’ to paying without having to do anything,” Spencer said.
Unlike Levelpath, Zip, or Oro Labs, which use AI to streamline corporate purchasing, Didero focuses on the supply chain. Its platform is designed for manufacturers and distributors who need to source raw materials and inputs needed to manufacture or sell products.
Didero has several smaller competitors that can handle some of the tasks the company does. For example, Cavela and Pietra help brands source and negotiate prices with manufacturers; Spencer said the companies offer the following services: Small businesses do not handle the complete procurement process from initial quote to final payment.
Didero has dozens of customers, but only Footprint, which provides sustainable plant-based packaging, is named.
