'We had thousands of suppliers, and we were distributing products into dozens of countries around the world,' Spencer (pictured left) told TechCrunch. His staff was overwhelmed by the manual complexity of sourcing suppliers, negotiating pricing, tracking orders, and managing payments. 'I found myself running this big team that was not really set up for success,' he said. He sold Markai in 2023, just as it was becoming clear that generative AI could streamline the most time-consuming procurement hurdles for manufacturers and distributors. Didero, whose mission is to automate many of the complexities of global procurement, just raised a $30 million Series A co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with participation from Microsoft's venture fund M12. Until the advent of generative AI, these fragmented pieces had to be tracked by humans who spent their days chasing suppliers and manually updating systems of record. Didero claims its platform can ingest that communication, putting a...
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