Many mid-market businesses still struggle with supply chain management because they cannot afford SAP or do not have the IT staff to handle such a sophisticated program. An early-stage firm called Didero made the decision to create an AI-powered tool to make things simpler for them.

The business disclosed a $7 million startup investment today. The firm also said that it was coming out of stealth and opening up the general public to purchase its product while it was at it.

Tim Spencer, a co-founder and product lead, told TechCrunch, "We are trying to build an end-to-end suite that allows procurement teams to manage their suppliers across a range of existing point solution markets."

This include locating suppliers, settling disputes over contracts, overseeing purchase orders, generating invoices, and paying bills in addition to offering thorough analysis and performing routine supplier management duties.

Spencer stated that in developing the solution, they aimed to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to assist their target mid-market businesses in making up for their resource deficiencies. Smaller businesses lack the luxury of forcing suppliers to follow their regulations, which is something that larger organizations can accomplish, while AI can take care of most of the menial labor.

AI is one of the major breakthroughs here, especially for our wedge of mid-market enterprises. Because many of these duties could not be completed [automatically] in the pre-AI era, according to Spencer.

Depending on the task or necessity, the organization uses a range of AI models, such as OpenAI and Google Gemini, and they are always testing to see which model is most suited to what they are trying to do. We make use of numerous publicly available basic models and APIs. The CEO of the company, Tom Petit, stated, "We're not developing our own foundational models, but we're doing a lot of fine-tuning of some of the existing models."

He said that they have a few highly specialized models that they have programmed themselves that enable tasks like data extraction from price lists, purchase orders, and tables—documents that are essential to the procurement process.

Lorenz Pallhuber, Spencer's co-founder, contributes his supply chain knowledge. Pallhuber spent seven years with McKinsey providing supply chain and procurement software advice to Fortune 500 companies, while Spencer oversaw procurement at Markai, a business he helped create. Petit contributes his technical know-how and machine learning and AI training. In addition, he was a co-founder of Landis, a firm that assisted tenants in obtaining a mortgage and raised over $200 million.

Since the company's December launch, they have been developing the product. Last month, the $7 million seed round came to an end. First Round Capital led the round, with Construct Capital, AI Grant, Box Group, Company Ventures, and Conviction joining it. Industry angels made further contributions.