For decades, manufacturing procurement has been the unglamorous backbone of global industry — a sprawling, manual process where purchasing managers toggle between spreadsheets, enterprise resource planning systems, and supplier emails to keep production lines humming. Now, a San Francisco-based startup called Didero is wagering that agentic artificial intelligence can finally drag this critical function into the modern era, and some of the most prominent names in venture capital are backing that thesis with serious money.

Didero announced a $30 million Series A round co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Expeditions Fund, and a roster of notable angel investors. The funding will be used to scale the company’s agentic AI platform, which sits as an intelligent layer atop existing ERP systems — including SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics — to automate the end-to-end procurement workflow for manufacturers, as reported by TechCrunch.

A Founder’s Journey From Factory Floors to AI Agents

Didero was co-founded by CEO Kevin Shen and CTO Tom Spencer, both of whom bring deep domain expertise to the problem. Shen, who previously worked in manufacturing operations and supply chain consulting, has spoken publicly about witnessing firsthand how procurement teams at mid-market manufacturers were drowning in repetitive, low-value tasks — from requesting quotes to tracking order confirmations to reconciling invoices. Spencer, an AI and machine learning veteran, saw an opportunity to apply the latest advances in large language models and autonomous agent architectures to a domain that had been largely ignored by the first wave of enterprise AI startups.

In a post on X, Shen described the company’s mission in characteristically blunt terms: “Procurement in manufacturing is broken. Buyers spend 80% of their time on tasks a well-designed AI agent can handle better, faster, and without burnout,” he wrote. Spencer echoed the sentiment, noting on X that the company’s technology “doesn’t rip and replace your ERP — it makes your ERP actually useful,” he posted.

What ‘Agentic AI’ Actually Means in the Procurement Context

The term “agentic AI” has become one of the most contested buzzwords in enterprise technology, but Didero’s implementation offers a concrete illustration of what the concept looks like in practice. Unlike traditional procurement software that automates a single step — say, generating a purchase order — Didero’s platform deploys autonomous AI agents that can execute multi-step workflows with minimal human intervention. According to the company’s official blog post announcing the round, these agents can autonomously identify when materials need to be reordered based on production schedules, solicit and compare quotes from approved suppliers, negotiate basic terms, generate and route purchase orders for approval, and even flag anomalies in supplier invoices.

The key architectural decision, as detailed by SiliconAngle, is that Didero’s agents operate as a middleware layer that integrates directly with a manufacturer’s existing ERP system via APIs and pre-built connectors. This means companies don’t have to undergo a painful system migration to adopt the technology — a critical selling point for mid-market manufacturers that may have spent years and millions of dollars implementing their current ERP infrastructure. The agents read from and write back to the ERP, maintaining it as the system of record while handling the cognitive labor that previously required human buyers.

Microsoft’s Venture Arm Signals Strategic Interest

The participation of M12, Microsoft’s corporate venture fund, is particularly noteworthy and may hint at deeper strategic alignment. As reported by Tech in Asia, M12’s involvement suggests that Microsoft sees Didero’s approach as complementary to its own Dynamics 365 ERP ecosystem and its broader Azure AI infrastructure. For Didero, the relationship could open doors to Microsoft’s vast enterprise customer base, many of whom are mid-market manufacturers running Dynamics 365 as their core operational system.

The investment also reflects a broader trend in enterprise AI funding: corporate venture arms are increasingly placing bets on vertical AI applications that can drive adoption of their parent companies’ cloud platforms. Microsoft, which has invested heavily in OpenAI and is embedding AI capabilities across its product suite, stands to benefit if Didero’s agents run on Azure infrastructure and integrate tightly with Dynamics 365. Neither company has publicly confirmed specific technical partnership details beyond the investment, but industry observers note that M12 investments frequently precede deeper go-to-market collaborations.

Why Manufacturing Procurement Remains a $2 Trillion Pain Point

To understand why investors are enthusiastic about Didero’s opportunity, it helps to appreciate the sheer scale and inefficiency of manufacturing procurement. Global manufacturers collectively spend trillions of dollars annually on direct materials — the raw inputs, components, and sub-assemblies that go into finished products. Yet the procurement process for these materials remains astonishingly manual at most companies, particularly in the mid-market segment (roughly $100 million to $2 billion in annual revenue) that Didero is targeting.

According to TechCrunch, Didero’s internal research suggests that a typical procurement buyer at a mid-market manufacturer spends upwards of 70-80% of their time on transactional tasks — sending RFQs, chasing supplier confirmations, updating ERP records, and reconciling delivery discrepancies. This leaves precious little time for strategic activities like supplier relationship development, cost optimization, and risk management. The result is a function that is simultaneously mission-critical and chronically under-resourced, creating fertile ground for AI-driven automation.

The Competitive Field and Didero’s Differentiation Strategy

Didero is not the only company pursuing AI-powered procurement automation. Established players like Coupa, Jaggaer, and SAP Ariba have been layering AI features onto their platforms, while newer startups are attacking various slices of the procurement workflow. However, Didero’s founders argue that their approach is fundamentally different in two respects. First, the company is building specifically for direct materials procurement in manufacturing — a domain with unique complexities around engineering specifications, quality requirements, and production scheduling that generic procurement platforms handle poorly. Second, Didero’s agentic architecture is designed for autonomous execution, not just recommendation.

As Shen explained in the company’s blog announcement, “Most procurement AI today is copilot-style — it suggests what a buyer should do, and then the buyer still has to do it. Our agents actually do the work, with humans approving key decisions and handling exceptions.” This distinction between copilot and agent is becoming a central axis of competition in enterprise AI more broadly, and Didero is firmly planting its flag on the agentic side. SiliconAngle noted that this autonomous execution capability is what most impressed Chemistry and Headline during the due diligence process.

Early Traction and the Road to Enterprise Scale

While Didero has not disclosed specific revenue figures, the company indicated in its blog post that it has been working with a growing roster of mid-market manufacturers across sectors including automotive parts, industrial equipment, and electronics contract manufacturing. Early customers have reportedly seen significant reductions in procurement cycle times and buyer workload, with some reporting that AI agents now handle the majority of routine purchase order transactions without human intervention, according to Didero’s blog.

The $30 million in fresh capital will be directed toward three primary areas: expanding the engineering team to accelerate product development, building out the go-to-market organization with sales and customer success hires focused on the manufacturing vertical, and deepening integrations with additional ERP systems and supplier networks. As reported by Tech in Asia, the company also plans to expand its presence internationally, with particular interest in manufacturing hubs across Europe and Asia where procurement complexity is amplified by multi-currency, multi-language, and cross-border regulatory requirements.

What This Funding Round Reveals About the State of Enterprise AI

Didero’s Series A arrives at an inflection point for enterprise AI investment. After a period of exuberant funding for horizontal AI platforms and foundation model companies, investors are increasingly gravitating toward vertical applications that solve specific, measurable business problems. Manufacturing procurement — with its clear ROI metrics, massive addressable market, and deeply entrenched inefficiencies — represents exactly the kind of domain where agentic AI can deliver near-term value rather than speculative future promise.

Chemistry and Headline, the round’s co-leads, have both been active in enterprise software investing and are known for backing companies at the intersection of AI and operational workflows. Their willingness to lead a $30 million Series A for a company focused on a single vertical function signals confidence not just in Didero’s team and technology, but in the thesis that the next generation of enterprise AI winners will be specialists, not generalists. For the manufacturing sector — an industry that has historically been slow to adopt new technology — the arrival of well-funded, purpose-built AI solutions like Didero could mark the beginning of a long-overdue transformation in how goods are sourced, purchased, and delivered to the factory floor.