Tim Spencer realized just how complicated manufacturing procurement can be while running Markai, an e-commerce startup in Asia, during the pandemic.
“We had thousands of suppliers, and we were distributing products into dozens of countries around the world,” Spencer (pictured left) told TechCrunch. His staff was overwhelmed by the manual complexity of sourcing suppliers, negotiating pricing, tracking orders, and managing payments.
“I found myself running this big team that was not really set up for success,” he said. He sold Markai in 2023, just as it was becoming clear that generative AI could streamline the most time-consuming procurement hurdles for manufacturers and distributors.
Later that year, Spencer launched Didero with Lorenz Pallhuber (pictured center), a veteran of McKinsey’s procurement practice, and Tom Petit, the former technical co-founder of Landis.
Didero, whose mission is to automate many of the complexities of global procurement, just raised a $30 million Series A co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with participation from Microsoft’s venture fund M12.
“Global trade runs on natural language communication,” Spencer said. “It’s emails, WeChat, phone calls, purchase orders, and packing lists.”
Until the advent of generative AI, these fragmented pieces had to be tracked by humans who spent their days chasing suppliers and manually updating systems of record. Didero claims its platform can ingest that communication, putting a significant portion of the procurement workflow on autopilot.
Didero functions as an agentic AI layer that sits on top of a company’s existing ERP, acting as a coordinator that reads incoming communications and automatically executes the necessary updates and tasks.
“The goal is to go from ‘I need a good’ to payment without having to lift a finger,” 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 required to build or sell their products.
Didero has a few smaller competitors that can handle some of the tasks that the company does. For instance, Cavela and Pietra help brands source and negotiate pricing with manufacturers, but according to Spencer, these companies serve small and medium-sized companies and don’t handle the full procurement process, from the first quote to the final payment.
Didero has dozens of customers but named only one, Footprint, a provider of sustainable, plant-based packaging.