Tim Spencer Realized How Complicated Manufacturing Purchasing Can Be When Executing Markai, an e-commerce startup in Asia, during the pandemic.
“We had thousands of suppliers and we distributed products to dozens of countries around the world,” Spencer (pictured left) told TechCrunch. His team was overwhelmed by the manual complexity of sourcing suppliers, negotiating prices, tracking orders, and managing payments.
“I found myself leading this big team that wasn’t really ready to succeed,” he said. He sold Markai in 2023, just as it was becoming clear that generative AI could streamline the most time-consuming sourcing 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 Lands.
Didero, whose mission is to automate many of the complexities of global procurement, just raised a $30 million Series A round co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with participation from Microsoft’s M12 venture capital fund.
“Global commerce relies 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 elements had to be tracked by humans who spent their days chasing vendors and manually updating systems of record. Didero claims its platform can ingest this communication, putting a significant portion of the procurement workflow on autopilot.
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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 necessary updates and tasks.
“The goal is to go from ‘I need something’ to paying without having to lift a finger,” Spencer said.
Unlike Levelpath, Zip or Oro Labs, which use AI to streamline business purchasing, Didero focuses on the supply chain. Its platform is designed for manufacturers and distributors who need to procure the raw materials and inputs necessary to manufacture or sell their products.
Didero has a few smaller competitors that can handle some of the tasks the company does. For example, Cavela And Rock help brands source and negotiate prices with manufacturers, but according to Spencer, these companies serve small and medium-sized businesses and do not manage the entire procurement process from first quote to final payment.
Didero has dozens of clients but only named one, Footprinta supplier of sustainable plant-based packaging.
Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Before joining TechCrunch, she wrote about venture capital for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned her CFA designation.
You can contact or check Marina’s outreach by sending an email marina.temkin@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at +1 347-683-3909 on Signal.
