Didero is leveraging AI to address supply chain management for mid-market firms

For many medium -sized market companies, supply chain management is still a stubborn problem. Early start Dodero decided to create an AI fuel tool to make it easier. Today, the company announced $7 million in seed funding. At the same time, the startup also announced that it is coming out of secrecy and bringing its products to the masses. "We're trying to build end-to-end suites that allow procurement teams to manage their suppliers across the various existing single point solutions markets," Tim Spencer, chief product officer and co-founder, told TechCrunch.

This includes sourcing suppliers, concluding contracts, processing purchase orders, opening invoices and payments, while providing detailed analysis and handling supplier management tasks. Spencer said that when developing the product, they want to take advantage of AI to help their target mid-market companies make up for the lack of resources. Because big companies can force suppliers to play by their rules, smaller companies don't have that luxury, and AI can handle a lot of the grunt work.

“One of the huge unlocks here, particularly for our wedge of mid-market manufacturers, is AI. Because in the pre-AI world, it was basically not possible to do a lot of these tasks [in an automated way],” Spencer said. The company uses different AI models, including OpenAI and Google Gemini, depending on the task or requirement, and they're constantly experimenting to see which model works best for what they're trying to achieve. “We use a lot of underlying models and APIs. We won't be building our own base model, but we're making a lot of improvements to some of the existing models.

In addition, he said, they have some very specialized models that they code themselves to support the extraction of data from documents such as forms, purchase orders or price lists that are critical to the procurement process. Spencer and co-founder Lorenz Pallhuber provide supply chain expertise. Spencer leads procurement at his co-founded startup Markai, while Pallhuber spent seven years at McKinsey consulting on supply chain and procurement software for Fortune 500 clients. Petit provides technical advice and training in AI and machine learning. He also co-founded Landis, a startup that raised more than $200 million and helped renters figure out how to get a mortgage. The company launched in December and they have been developing the product ever since. A $7 million seed round closed last month. The round was led by First Round Capital, with participation from Construct Capital, AI Grant, Box Group, Company Ventures and Conviction. Industry angels also contributed.