Supply chain management remains a challenge for many mid-sized businesses that can't afford SAP or lack the IT resources to manage complex programs. Early-stage startup Didero decided to build an AI-powered tool to ease the burden for these companies.
Today, the company announced a $7 million seed round of funding, at the same time the startup is coming out of stealth and launching its product to the public.
“We're trying to build an end-to-end suite that enables procurement teams to manage suppliers across the various point solution markets that exist,” product lead and co-founder Tim Spencer told TechCrunch.
This includes finding suppliers, negotiating contracts, managing purchase orders, creating invoices and making payments, providing detailed analytics and handling background supplier management tasks.
Spencer said that when developing the product, he wanted to use AI to help the mid-sized businesses he targeted to fill resource gaps: Large companies can make suppliers play by their rules, but smaller businesses don't have that luxury, and AI can handle a lot of the grunt work.
“One of the big changes here, especially for mid-market manufacturers, is AI, because in the pre-AI world, a lot of these tasks were essentially impossible to do with AI. [in an automated way]” said Spencer.
Depending on the task and requirements, the company uses a variety of AI models, including those from OpenAI and Google Gemini, and is continually experimenting to see which models are best suited for what it's trying to achieve. “We use a lot of underlying models and APIs that are out there. We're not creating our own underlying models, but we are fine-tuning some of the existing models,” said Tom Petit, the company's CEO.
Additionally, he said, there are some very specific models that the company has coded itself to enhance functionality such as extracting data from tables, purchase orders and price lists, which are documents that are key to the procurement process.
Spencer and co-founder Lorenz Pallhuber have supply chain expertise; Spencer ran procurement at Marukai, a startup he helped found, and Pallhuber spent seven years at McKinsey advising Fortune 500 clients on supply chain and procurement software. Petit has technical skills and training in AI and machine learning; he was also co-founder of Landis, a startup that raised more than $200 million and helped renters figure out how to get a mortgage.
The company was founded in December and has been developing its product ever since. It closed a $7 million seed round last month. The round was led by First Round Capital, with participation from Construct Capital, AI Grant, Box Group, Company Ventures and Conviction. Industry angel investors also contributed.