AI is poised to completely transform foundational industries, especially across supply chain and procurement where the amount of unstructured and disparate data makes everything far more complicated than in most spaces. We’re excited to partner with @tcpetit, @tspencer15, and @LPallhuber — the amazing team behind @DideroAI. They are building an end-to-end solution perfectly designed to help companies streamline complexity and reduce manual processes, saving both time and money. More from us here: constructcap.com/articles/in…

Today, we are thrilled to introduce Didero and announce $7M in seed funding to make trading with companies around the world as easy as trading across the street. Our procurement agent integrates with our customers’ existing systems and uses AI trained on best practices in supply chain management to automate the most common procurement workflows — from chasing down suppliers to running an entire RFQ process. Supply chains are getting more complex, and teams need better technology Each year, $32 trillion of international trade binds nations together and provides us with the food, transportation, materials, entertainment and goods that we depend on. At Didero, we’re focused on the unsung heroes that make this trade possible: supply chain teams. Supply chain teams source vendors around the world, negotiate prices, draft commercial agreements, communicate on individual orders and ensure that the materials needed to make the products we depend on make it to manufacturers’ loading docks. They keep trade flowing despite significant headwinds. Supply chains are becoming increasingly complex, driven by geopolitical and regulatory factors. Businesses that are heavily reliant on China have been forced to diversify their supply chains and handle the ensuing geographic fragmentation. COVID (and the occasional ship blocking the world’s most important waterway) exposed what happens when trade routes break down and supply chains need to be reconfigured in a matter of days. Compounding that complexity is the lack of tooling available to help supply chain teams scale their work. Supply chain managers rely on software from the 1990s (or worse) to communicate with suppliers and are left to manually compile the data they need to be strategic. 86% of supply chain management time is spent on routine and reactive work, and 95% of business data is unstructured or hidden, meaning vast troves of potentially invaluable data are left unused. This is personal to us: when Tim was running a company with hundreds of suppliers across several countries, he couldn’t find the right technology to manage his supply chain. In the end, his team had to handle all the manual grunt work themselves. If we ask supply chain teams to be strategic and navigate increasing complexity, we need to provide them with better tools and give them the mind space and data intelligence to do the crucial work they were hired to do. AI makes supply chain magic happen Much of the end-to-end procurement process involves communicating in natural language with suppliers. Generative AI makes it possible to parse those communications and turn them into useful insights. Didero integrates with procurement teams’ existing systems — from email to ERPs — to structure and manage supply chain data. Our agents can use that understanding to facilitate and automate sourcing, onboarding, purchase order management, invoice management and payments. Our manufacturing customers are already seeing huge savings in time and money: - One of our early customers used to spend every Monday morning wasting hours emailing every single supplier to ask for status updates on outstanding purchase orders. They now use Didero to proactively and automatically get these updates from their suppliers. - A chemicals manufacturer identified tens of thousands of dollars in monthly procurement savings by having visibility over ten years of direct and indirect spend, previously hidden in unstructured data. - A biotech team is saving dozens of hours per week by having Didero automatically reconcile all of their POs, invoices and goods receipt notes. From idea to dozens of customers and a great team Building Didero is deeply meaningful to us. Growing up, the three of us, Lorenz, Tim and Tom, took it as a given that the world was becoming a more interconnected and peaceful place. We grew up taking full advantage of increasing opportunities for connections: Lorenz had his first taste of America when he went on a student exchange trip from Austria to Seattle. Tim accompanied his pilot father on trips to Tanzania, Honduras and Japan. Tom moved from his hometown in Belgium to experience life in Dallas, Berlin, London, Almaty and New York. And yet, the last few years have challenged that vision of the world. They have confronted us with autocrats determined to divide us with chaos and fear. They have shown us that when faced with uncertainty, our instinct is to tear down down the bridges we have built. Most importantly, they have proven that peace and prosperity shouldn’t be taken for granted. Didero is our effort to bring the world closer together. Having built companies before, we know that startups are a team sport, and we wouldn’t be here without the support of the many incredible people surrounding us. To our dozens of early customers, thank you for taking a bet on us and for spending hours with us, helping us build an incredible product! To our investors and angels, including those who have worked with us in past endeavors, we’re grateful for your trust. And to our incredible team — thank you for your hard work and for being trailblazers with us. We are actively recruiting ambitious and talented engineers to join our team in New York. If what we’re doing resonates, please get in touch at [email protected]. If you are a supply chain leader excited to hear more about how AI can transform procurement, we’d also love to hear from you at [email protected]. Onwards! Lorenz, Tim and Tom

Bold ambition. Strong founding team solving a personal pain point. Compelling why now. Painkiller not a vitamin. Deep diligence work to validate the problem. Early momentum. Out of all of these traits that investors look for, it’s rare to find an early-stage startup that ticks each box. @DideroAI does — this team is the real deal. Super pumped to be leading their $7M seed round (with friends like @BoxGroup and @jaltma joining us @firstround). I thought I’d mark their launch day news (@Techcrunch article in next post) by trying to dig a bit more into the details of what they’ve gotten right on each of these fronts, in case it’s interesting for other founders thinking through how to structure their fundraising pitches. Vision: Didero is an AI procurement agent that automates the most common supply chain workflows for mid-market manufacturers. Their vision? Make trading with companies across the world as easy as trading across the street. Boom. The world of supply chain logistics may be a “dusty industry” as my partner @btrenchard likes to say, but this framing of the impact they hope to make on the world doesn't have to be. 2X founders with personal pain point: @tcpetit, @LPallhuber, and @tspencer15 make for a strong AND well-balanced team. For starters, everyone has already been a founder before, so they’ve already gone 0 to 1. But they’ve also lived the problem and developed extensive experience in supply chain. Pretty rare combo in my experience. While building Markai, Tim had hundreds of suppliers across several countries and was looking for tools to help him scale his supply chain operations, but he couldn’t find any better way to manage procurement than to hire a team of 15 people to do manual work. Love when founders decide to go out and build the tool they wish they had. Compelling why now: The “why now” piece is one that too many founding teams rush over IMO. Here’s Didero’s: Supply chains are only getting more complex. China used to be a one-stop shop, but now companies are looking to diversify their supply chain — good for the overall resilience of the system, but leads to significant additional work. Before advances in generative AI, this was tricky to solve — communicating in natural language is important here. It’s a smart application of AI to a legacy industry that’s running on 1990s software (at best). This quote from the team sums it up well: “If we ask supply chain teams to be strategic and navigate increasing complexity, we need to provide them with better tools and give them the mind space and data intelligence to do the crucial work they were hired to do.” Deep customer discovery work: Tom, Lorenz, and Tim are truly students of the space. They’ve gone what we @firstround like to call “unreasonably deep” in their pursuit of understanding the problem from every angle. When they pitched us earlier this year, they’d already done calls with 200+ supply chain/procurement professionals and industry experts to validate the problem, and were already working with more than a dozen design partners. I don’t take very many pitches where founders walk in having done that amount of homework. Painkiller, not a vitamin: This framework is a cliche for a reason — it’s definitely something that will be on investors’ minds as you tee up the problem you’re solving. Didero’s discovery work (and our own diligence with customer calls) revealed a ton of pain and manual work, specifically in the startups and mid-market segment. Right now, most procurement folks are drowning in manual tasks, with a lot of extremely taxing, repetitive work. Because supply chain teams are so bogged down with these processes, there is typically no time for strategic work and optimizing spend By helping people focus less on that and more on the higher order work these employees want to be doing like building supply chain resilience and building deeper relationships, Didero is solving a real pain point (and saving teams real $$$). Early momentum: The team has executed very quickly. Incorporated in December, and by their pitch to us in April they had many early design partners, strong hires, a lot of product built out and a feature-rich demo. They’ve already seen quick wins for customers, too, saving multiple early customers tens of thousands of dollars each month. Small example: One of their manufacturing customers used to spend every Monday morning wasting hours emailing every single supplier to ask for a status update on outstanding purchase orders. Confident that there will be even more to share in the months and years ahead — watch this space.

Celebrity-backed rent-to-own startup Landis expands to Florida inman.com/2022/01/25/celebri…