Amar Amte is the founder and CEO of Pegbo, a Menlo Park construction-tech company that helps general contractors and public agencies find, vet, and track small, local, and diverse trade partners. After roughly a decade at Google and five years at Yahoo in engineering and program-management roles, he left big tech in 2023 to attack one of construction's oldest headaches: the 'spray and pray' bid invitation. Pegbo runs a searchable directory of more than a million verified trade partners and automates outreach, bid coverage, and Good Faith Effort compliance reporting. The company raised $1.4 million in a 2024 pre-seed round led by Nirman Ventures and is a pre-qualified supplier to contractors including Skanska, Webcor, Swinerton, and Hathaway Dinwiddie.
Francisco Martin-Rayo is the co-founder and CEO of Helios AI, a climate-risk and commodity-price platform that helps agri-food companies see supply shocks before they hit. A former Mexican-avocado trader who became a BCG principal and AI-fintech executive, he teamed up with ex-Google engineer Eden Canlilar in late 2022 to build an AI that scrapes 250,000 news sources every 15 minutes, runs custom models for dozens of crops, and tells procurement teams when, how much, and where to buy across roughly 90 countries.
Matthias Depenbusch is a German-trained, Vienna-based serial founder who builds software for unglamorous but expensive problems. He co-founded AVISIO, a SaaS platform that used AI-based purchasing suggestions to cut the cost of goods sold for independent 4- and 5-star hotels and restaurants, integrating their POS and PMS systems to automate inventory and ordering. Before that he helped launch Appinio, the Hamburg real-time mobile market-research company that landed 8th in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and on the FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies. AVISIO won the Hospitality UPGRADE Award 2020 before filing for insolvency in 2023 amid a frozen funding climate.
Bristlecone is the industry's largest pure-play supply chain services provider and a Mahindra Group company. Founded in 1998 in San Jose, California, it helps Global 2000 organizations plan, source, and fulfill through AI-first supply chain transformation - blending consulting, system integration, and its own cloud platform, Bristlecone NEO. Roughly 2,500-2,700 consultants across a dozen global hubs have delivered over 1,000 engagements for more than 300 customers in life sciences, retail, consumer goods, manufacturing, and high-tech.
Alexander Kates is the cofounder and CEO of Vetcove, the free ordering platform that lets veterinary practices, zoos, aquariums and animal welfare groups shop every supplier at once - think Kayak, but for the stuff that keeps animals healthy. He built it with his brother Mitch after watching the inventory manager at their father's equine veterinary practice juggle 30-40 vendor tabs by hand. Before veterinary supply chains, Kates was a digital strategist who advised Fortune 500 companies, taught executives on four continents, and co-wrote a bestselling marketing textbook. Vetcove now employs hundreds and serves a large slice of US veterinary hospitals.
Dallas Hogensen is the co-founder and CEO of Felux, a Cleveland-based digital marketplace and operating platform for the steel and metals industry. A ranch-raised Oregonian and former college football player turned serial startup operator, he scaled Lyft Business toward $1 billion in revenue and co-founded two companies (Liveli and Signal HQ) before relocating his family to Ohio to digitize a $2 trillion industry famous for handshakes and fax machines. Under the irreverent banner #makingsteelsexy, he has grown Felux's platform volume from roughly $10M to hundreds of millions in transactions, raised more than $24M in venture capital, and set out to put Cleveland back on the map as a hub for industrial technology.
Vetcove is the veterinary industry's unified purchasing platform. It aggregates the catalogs of every major distributor, manufacturer, compounding pharmacy, and diagnostic lab into one searchable storefront, so veterinary practices can compare real-time pricing and stock across all their vendors and order from everyone in one cart. The platform is free for clinics and nonprofits; Vetcove earns revenue from vendors and hospital groups. It serves more than 23,000 veterinary practices across the United States.
Ramp is a finance operations platform that combines corporate cards, expense management, bill pay, procurement, travel, treasury and accounting automation into one system. Built to save businesses time and money, it uses AI to cut manual finance work, enforce spend controls, and surface savings. Founded in 2019 by Harvard friends Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh and Gene Lee, Ramp serves 70,000+ organizations and reached a $44B valuation in June 2026.
Cofactr is a New York-based software and logistics company that automates electronics procurement and supply chain operations for hardware manufacturers. Its cloud platform takes a team from bill of materials (BOM) to build by combining AI agents with ITAR-registered warehouses to handle sourcing, ordering, traceability, storage, kitting, and delivery. Cofactr is built for high-compliance, fast-moving industries such as aerospace, defense, robotics, and medical devices.
Order.co is a New York-based AI-powered spend efficiency platform that consolidates business purchasing, approvals, payments, and reporting into one system. Founded in 2016 as Negotiatus and rebranded to Order in 2022, it helps mid-market and enterprise companies cut costs through AI-driven sourcing, a 17,000+ vendor network, and accounts payable automation, overseeing more than half a billion dollars in annualized spend for customers like WeWork, SoulCycle, and Hugo Boss.
Tom Petit is the co-founder and CEO of Didero, a New York company building an agentic AI procurement platform that sits on top of a manufacturer's existing systems and quietly does the routine work of running a supply chain. A Belgian who came of age in Texas, he trained in computational mathematics at Stanford and Cambridge, did data science at Airbnb and HelloFresh, and co-founded the real-estate fintech Landis before turning to the unglamorous world of purchase orders and supplier emails. In February 2026 Didero raised a $30M Series A co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with Microsoft's M12 participating, bringing total funding to roughly $37M.
Justin Wenig is the founder and CEO of Starbridge, a New York AI company that helps businesses find and win public-sector contracts. He earlier co-founded Coursedog, a higher-education operations platform he scaled to 300+ institutions before a nine-figure sale to JMI Equity in 2021. A Columbia computer science grad and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he raised a $42M Series A led by Craft Ventures in October 2025 and angel-invests in 50+ AI startups on the side.
Matt Garippa is the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Order.co, the New York B2B purchasing platform formerly known as Negotiatus. A former fixed income trader who pivoted from Wall Street trading desks to building software, he and his brother Zach started the company in 2016 after a friend running a CrossFit gym complained about the grind of ordering supplies. Today Order.co helps hundreds of finance and operations teams - including WeWork and SoulCycle - consolidate purchasing, payments, and spend control, and Matt leads its business strategy, partnerships, and analytics, now centered on AI-driven procurement.
Matthew Haber is the co-founder and CEO of Cofactr, a New York-based platform that automates procurement and logistics for electronics hardware teams in aerospace, defense, medtech and robotics. A theater-designer-turned-engineer, he built tours for Coachella acts and escape rooms before co-founding an experiential R&D firm (BeSide) that sold to agency MAS in 2018. He launched Cofactr in the Y Combinator W22 batch; in December 2024 the company raised a $17.2M Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $28.8M.
AppDirect is a San Francisco-based B2B subscription commerce platform that connects technology providers, advisors, and businesses so they can buy, sell, and manage software, hardware, connectivity, AI, and energy services in one place. Founded in 2009, it powers white-label marketplaces for telecom giants and enterprises, and is assembling an 'Everything Store' for B2B technology through a rapid string of acquisitions.
Sath Sivasothy is VP of Sales and Marketing at Vyrian Inc., a Houston-based electronic components distributor and government defense contractor he co-founded in 2011. With a background in electrical engineering and over two decades in the semiconductor and electronics industry - including a stint as a Product Development Engineer at Texas Instruments and a run as VP of Sales at Silicon Valley burn-in testing firm CEIBIS Inc. where he doubled gross sales to $7M in 24 months - Sivasothy has built Vyrian into an Inc. 5000 multi-year honoree with 130+ employees across 12 global offices.
Arkestro is a San Francisco-based predictive procurement platform that uses machine learning, game theory and behavioral science to help enterprise buyers run faster, smarter sourcing events. Born as BidOps in 2016, it now serves Fortune 500 manufacturers, energy and logistics firms and claims roughly 18.8% savings per dollar of spend.
Aumet is a Saudi-headquartered healthtech building an AI-first procurement operating system for pharmacies, hospitals and pharmaceutical suppliers across the Middle East. The platform connects more than 12,000 pharmacies with 1,000+ suppliers and processes roughly $1B in annual gross merchandise value.
DOSS is a San Francisco software company building an AI-native Adaptive Resource Platform (ARP) that replaces legacy ERP for physical-product businesses, unifying inventory, procurement, orders, fulfillment, and finance on a single real-time data model.
Kojo is the construction industry's leading materials procurement and management platform, connecting office teams, field crews, warehouses, and vendors on a single AI-powered system. Founded in 2018 by Maria Davidson (formerly known as Agora Systems), the San Francisco-based company has powered more than 10,000 construction projects across 47 states and processes billions in annual orders for trade and self-perform general contractors.
Akash Talyan is a Product Designer at Zip (ziphq.com), a San Francisco-based AI procurement platform valued at $2.2 billion. He leads design for the agent experience team, building the human-AI interfaces that power enterprise procurement automation. With a Master's in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech and a career spanning Coinbase, Verily Life Sciences, and Lucid Software, Akash brings rare depth to the challenge of making agentic AI workflows feel intuitive to real enterprise users.
Ali Amin-Javaheri is the co-founder and CEO of Knowde, the B2B digital marketplace and data platform transforming how the $5 trillion global chemicals industry does business online. With 11 years of experience at ChemPoint - where he helped scale the chemical distribution startup to over $400M in revenue - Ali built Knowde from a PowerPoint vision into a platform hosting 8,000+ supplier storefronts and 230,000+ chemical products. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Coatue, and Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher's fund), Knowde has raised $180.8M total, including a $60M Series C in August 2024. Ali's drive is deeply personal: his father Mehdi fled Iran in 1985 and struggled to find work commensurate with his chemical engineering degree, and Ali grew up reading chemistry trade magazines, determined to modernize an industry built on relationships and paper catalogs.
Edmund Zagorin is the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Arkestro, the AI-powered Predictive Procurement Orchestration platform he co-founded in San Francisco in 2017. Drawing on a philosophy degree, championship-level policy debate experience, and years as a procurement consultant to Fortune 500 companies, Zagorin built Arkestro around a radical premise: that AI, game theory, and behavioral science could predict procurement outcomes before a sourcing cycle begins - cutting sourcing time by 60-90% and delivering average cost savings of 18.8% per million spent. The company has raised $104M in total funding, including a $36M Series B in 2025 led by Altira Group and Aramco Ventures. Away from procurement, he publishes fiction and poetry under the pen name Elizeya Quate.
Micah Rodman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kojo, the leading AI-powered construction procurement platform processing over $5 billion in annual materials orders for 600+ contractors across the US and Canada. A Yale alumnus who cut his teeth as a manager on Ray Dalio's team at Bridgewater Associates, Rodman co-founded Kojo in 2018 to digitize the paper-and-phone world of construction materials procurement. He transitioned from COO to CEO after founding CEO Maria Davidson stepped back, steering the company through a $94M fundraise and partnerships with industry giants like Wesco International.
Dr. Mohamed Mazen Batterjee is the Co-Founder, CCO, and investor behind Aumet, an AI-first procurement operating system reshaping pharmaceutical supply chains across the Middle East. A scion of one of Saudi Arabia's oldest pharma dynasties, he parlayed a DBA from IE Business School and 15+ years running Batterjee Pharmaceuticals into co-founding a platform that now connects 12,000+ pharmacies, 1,000+ suppliers, and has processed over $1 billion in GMV. Aumet closed a $12M Series A in May 2026, bringing total funding to $21.84M.
Shawn Lane is the Chief Executive Officer of Ottimate, an AI-powered accounts payable automation and payments platform serving mid-market businesses across hospitality, healthcare, construction, retail, and manufacturing. With more than 30 years of experience scaling enterprise SaaS and supply chain software companies - from Procter & Gamble to i2 Technologies to E2open - Lane brings rare operational depth to one of fintech's fastest-growing categories. His career is a through-line of companies that challenged legacy processes with intelligent automation, and Ottimate is his biggest stage yet.
Shahed Jaber is the Co-Founder of Aumet Inc, MENA's largest B2B healthcare procurement marketplace. Based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, he previously founded UniOrders - a B2B healthcare marketplace acquired by Aumet in 2020. With a pharmacy background from the University of Jordan, Jaber has helped grow Aumet into an AI-first procurement platform serving 12,000+ pharmacies and 32 hospitals across the MENA region, processing over $1 billion in GMV and raising $21.84M in total funding.
Yahya Aqel is the co-founder and CEO of Aumet, MENA's largest B2B healthcare marketplace and AI-first procurement operating system. A biomedical engineer turned serial entrepreneur, he has founded five health tech startups across Silicon Valley, the Middle East, and Western Europe — two of which resulted in successful exits. Aumet, backed by Emkan Capital and others, has raised $21.84M to date and processes over $1 billion in gross merchandise volume annually, connecting 12,000+ pharmacies with 1,000+ pharmaceutical suppliers across Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
Globality builds AI-powered autonomous sourcing software that helps Fortune 500 enterprises run procurement projects without the spreadsheets, RFPs, and consultants that have ruled the function for decades. Its AI agent, Glo, scopes projects, finds suppliers, analyzes proposals, and negotiates - all in natural language.
Icertis is the AI-native contract intelligence company that turns enterprise strategy into faster execution at scale. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, Icertis helps 1 in 5 Fortune Global 500 companies manage millions of commercial agreements across 90+ countries through its Icertis Contract Intelligence platform - powered by Vera AI, a proprietary model trained on 17+ million contracts. With $496M in total funding, a $5B valuation, and nearly $350M in annual recurring revenue, Icertis has redefined what contract lifecycle management can do: turning buried legal text into live business intelligence.