Sruti Arulmani and the secret life of a shopping list

Hand soap is a modest place to begin a company story. It has neither the glamour of a laboratory breakthrough nor the theatrical possibilities of a garage. But when Sruti Arulmani explained what helped drive her to build Valdera, she included her habit of looking closely at the ingredients in the products she bought, even something as ordinary as hand soap. Most shopping lists end at the checkout. Hers pointed toward the people buying the ingredients.

Arulmani is the co-founder and CEO of Valdera, which makes software for sourcing chemicals and raw materials. Her brother, Dheev Arulmani, is its co-founder and COO. Their customers work on the purchasing decisions behind finished products: the materials a manufacturer needs, the suppliers capable of making them, and the information required before a buyer can say yes.

It is an occupation that makes familiar objects look a little less finished. Paint becomes a set of material choices. A coating becomes a technical specification and a supplier relationship. The object sitting politely on a shelf has a considerable amount of business going on behind it.

The small print before the big idea

In her own account of Valdera’s origins, Arulmani describes treating product research as a personal challenge. Before purchases such as paint for her home or a mattress, she would examine formulations, sources, and certifications. Quality and sustainability were part of the exercise. Buying something meant taking an interest in what had gone into it.

There is a pleasing inconvenience to that habit. The front of a package generally wants a quick decision. The details invite further questions. Arulmani followed those questions toward manufacturing, where choosing a promising ingredient is only one part of the task. Someone has to establish whether it can be obtained under the conditions a business requires.

The connection she makes is specific: her interest as a consumer helped motivate a platform for manufacturers. She wanted to help the people responsible for inputs find better options. A preference expressed at the shopping basket became a problem to work on much further upstream.

Her story gains its character from that continuity. The personal curiosity and the professional subject concern the same materials, viewed from opposite ends of the transaction. One end asks what is in the finished product. The other asks who can supply it.

Two disciplines, then two siblings

Arulmani’s background helps explain why she was equipped to follow the question. She studied at Stanford, with a double major in Chemical-Biological Engineering and Economics. Those subjects meet naturally in procurement. A material must perform as required; acquiring it must make sense for the business paying for it.

Her earlier work included chemical engineering research at the University of Toronto, investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and the investment team at Activant Capital. These are different vantage points on how technical work becomes a business. The laboratory asks whether something can work. Investment work asks what kind of company might be built around it.

Before Valdera, she evaluated SaaS and procurement solutions as an investor. She encountered an opening in chemicals and raw materials: the available software did not adequately handle their particular complexity. She decided to build a solution with Dheev, whose experience included working with industrial and chemical clients at McKinsey.

By 2021, the siblings had been introduced to Lerer Hippeau through its Stanford network. The investor saw a combination of Sruti’s manufacturing technology background and Dheev’s industry experience. Their partnership gave the company both a shared subject and different professional routes into it.

The sibling detail is memorable, but the allocation of work is equally useful to understanding Valdera. Sruti leads as CEO; Dheev serves as COO. A family connection brought together two people whose earlier work had exposed them to the same industry’s technical and commercial demands.

A name in a directory is only a beginning

Supplier discovery sounds straightforward until the requirement becomes specific. In chemicals, the relevant question reaches beyond whether a company sells a named substance. Buyers need to know whether a supplier can satisfy the technical properties, certifications, and other conditions attached to a specific use.

A long list of possible sellers can therefore leave a buyer with a great deal of work. Each name still needs investigation. Documents arrive in different formats. Specifications must be interpreted and compared. A contact can be perfectly real and still be unsuitable for the job.

The siblings built Valdera around data specific to those tasks. Their approach combines information about chemicals and suppliers with software that helps teams move through discovery and qualification. It addresses a search problem in which the meaning of the details matters as much as the ability to retrieve them.

That is why Arulmani’s subject is a useful test of business AI. A convincing answer has little value if the proposed material fails the requirement. The technical question survives the software demonstration. So does the buyer who has to explain the decision afterward.

The money behind the materials

In October 2024, Valdera announced a $15 million Series A led by Index Ventures. Existing investors included Susa Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, and BoxGroup. The round also brought participation from industry executives as investors and advisory board members, adding experience from companies accustomed to buying materials at scale.

The industrial connections included current and former executives from businesses such as Procter & Gamble, Estée Lauder, Unilever, Nestlé, and SAP Ariba. Their presence places the company’s proposition in a practical setting: organizations that must connect product ambitions with the work of getting inputs into production.

Valdera’s reported customer outcomes included shorter product launch timelines, lower costs, and wider supplier networks. The company’s figures describe results across its customer base, rather than a promise that any particular sourcing project will produce the same outcome. The useful point for Arulmani’s story is the range of consequences attached to one purchasing function.

A manufacturer’s buying decision reaches into the product’s economics and its schedule. A new supplier can affect availability; an alternative material can affect what gets made. Procurement sits close to the finished object even when the people doing it remain far from the advertising.

The agreement still belongs to people

Arulmani’s view of this work leaves room for the people who have always done it. In discussing Valdera, she keeps returning to the buyer-supplier relationship. Technology can make more of the market visible and reduce the effort required to find a promising match. The commercial relationship still has to be made.

“The chemicals industry is a relationships-based industry.”

Sruti Arulmani

That emphasis is particularly relevant to an industry with established supplier relationships. A system that helps a buyer investigate alternatives also has to fit into a profession built on trust, context, and judgment. More information is useful when someone can understand it, assess it, and act on it.

Valdera’s stated approach is to make those relationships easier to establish and maintain. There is a human ambition inside the technical one: let experienced people spend less of their working day assembling documentation and more of it considering the decisions the documentation is meant to support.

It also returns the story to the siblings. They are building software for transactions between people, with all the specificity that entails. A suitable supplier is a business with capabilities and constraints. A buyer has requirements and responsibilities. The software has to respect both sides of the conversation.

An expert’s work is the benchmark

By June 2026, Arulmani was describing a wider procurement workspace, bringing together category management, market intelligence, and sourcing. The ambition had extended from finding possible suppliers to helping teams understand where to concentrate their effort and how to read changes in their markets.

Her product standard is demanding in a concrete way. She says new AI features must deliver insight of the quality a domain expert would produce by hand. Features that fall short do not get released. It is a test grounded in the work a customer needs to complete.

She applies a similar discipline to running the company: choosing the most important customer problem and keeping the team focused on it. In a business with so many possible technical details, the act of deciding what deserves attention becomes part of the product’s usefulness.

Her hiring priorities offer another glimpse of the company she wants to build. She has emphasized curiosity, reasoning from fundamentals, and determination, while describing a team that spans AI, data science, chemistry, manufacturing, and supply chains. Those are disciplines with different working languages. Bringing them together means building an organization capable of understanding both a technical requirement and the person trying to fulfill it.

For Arulmani, that makes the people inside Valdera part of the same question as the software outside it. Customers need answers that hold up in their own businesses. The team producing those answers needs enough interest in the details to keep asking whether they do.

The personal thread is still visible. Arulmani began with an interest in what went into the objects she bought. Her company now works with the people making material decisions for manufacturers. Between those two positions lies an entire chain of specifications, documents, negotiations, and relationships.

Hand soap remains a small purchase. Following its ingredients, however, can take you a surprisingly long way from the bathroom sink.