Didero has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with participation from M12, the venture arm of Microsoft. The capital will support the company’s efforts to automate manufacturing procurement by deploying agentic AI across complex global supply chains.
The idea for Didero emerged from founder Tim Spencer’s firsthand experience navigating procurement challenges while leading Markai, an e-commerce startup in Asia, during the pandemic. Managing thousands of suppliers and distributing products across dozens of countries exposed the operational strain of traditional procurement systems.
“We had thousands of suppliers, and we were distributing products into dozens of countries around the world,” Spencer (pictured left) told TechCrunch. His team struggled with the manual demands of identifying suppliers, negotiating contracts, tracking shipments, and processing payments. “I found myself running this big team that was not really set up for success,” he said. Spencer exited Markai in 2023, at a time when advances in generative AI began showing potential to address many of these labor-intensive bottlenecks.
Later in 2023, Spencer co-founded Didero alongside Lorenz Pallhuber, formerly of McKinsey’s procurement practice, and Tom Petit, the previous technical co-founder of Landis. Together, they set out to simplify and automate the fragmented workflows that characterize global procurement.
“Global trade runs on natural language communication,” Spencer said. “It’s emails, WeChat, phone calls, purchase orders, and packing lists.” Historically, these disparate communications required procurement teams to manually reconcile updates and input data into enterprise systems. Didero’s platform is designed to ingest and interpret such communications, placing much of the procurement cycle on autopilot.
The company positions its technology as an agentic AI layer that integrates with a business’s existing ERP system. It reads inbound correspondence, extracts relevant information, and automatically carries out updates and tasks across procurement workflows.
“The goal is to go from ‘I need a good’ to payment without having to lift a finger,” Spencer said.
While companies such as Levelpath, Zip, and Oro Labs apply AI to corporate purchasing, Didero differentiates itself by concentrating on the supply chain side of procurement. Its solution is built specifically for manufacturers and distributors sourcing raw materials and production inputs, overseeing processes from the initial supplier quote through to final payment.
The startup faces limited competition in its niche. Platforms like Cavela and Pietra assist brands with sourcing and price negotiations, but according to Spencer, they primarily cater to small and mid-sized businesses and do not manage the entire procurement lifecycle.
Didero reports that it currently serves dozens of customers, naming Footprint, a sustainable plant-based packaging provider, among them. With fresh funding secured, the company aims to expand its reach among manufacturers and distributors seeking to modernize procurement operations through AI-driven automation.
