Didero Raises $30 Million to Take Manufacturing Orders for ‘Agent’ Autopilot | TechCrunch

Tim Spencer realized how complicated manufacturing procurement can be during the pandemic when he ran Markai, an e-commerce startup in Asia.

“We had thousands of suppliers and distributed products to dozens of countries around the world,” Spencer (pictured left) told TechCrunch. His employees were overwhelmed by the manual complexity of sourcing suppliers, negotiating prices, tracking orders and managing payments.

“I found myself running this big team that wasn’t really set up to succeed,” he said. Markai sold in 2023 just as it became clear that generative artificial intelligence could streamline the most challenging procurement hurdles for manufacturers and distributors.

Later that year, Spencer launched Didero with Lorenzo Pallhuber (pictured, center), a veteran of McKinsey’s procurement practice, and Tom Petit, a former technical co-founder of Landis.

Didero, whose mission is to automate many of the complexities of global procurement, just raised $30 million in Series A led by Chemistry and Headline, with participation from Microsoft’s M12 venture fund.

“Global business runs on natural language communication,” Spencer said. “It’s emails, WeChat, phone calls, orders and packing lists.”

Until the advent of generative artificial intelligence, these fragmented pieces had to be tracked by humans who spent their days chasing down suppliers and manually updating systems of record. Didero says its platform can absorb this communication, putting a significant portion of the procurement workflow on autopilot.

Didero acts as an AI agent layer that sits on top of the company’s existing ERP and acts as a coordinator that reads incoming communications and automatically performs the necessary updates and tasks.

“The goal is to go from ‘I need an item’ to payment without lifting 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 needed to manufacture or sell their 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, but according to Spencer, these companies serve small and medium-sized companies and do not manage the entire purchasing process, from the first offer to the final payment.

Didero has dozens of customers but has named just one, Footprint, a provider of sustainable, plant-based packaging.