procurement
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Sunny Lakhani Makes a Business of the Things Business Usually Ignores
After two decades in factories, trade and sourcing, the Tampa executive is applying an operator's eye to a stubborn question: how do essential supplies arrive reliably, repeatedly and with a paper trail?
Al Girardi Found Growth in the Unlikely Marriage of Marketing and Procurement
The GEP marketing chief built his career where brand, technology, and operations meet - then made a persuasive case that creative ambition improves when it learns to count.
Keith Hartley Wants Procurement to Stop Staring at the Rearview Mirror
Raised around factories and trained as an engineer, LevaData CEO Keith Hartley has spent his career closing the gap between the data manufacturers possess and the decisions their sourcing teams can actually make.
Tim Spencer
Tim Spencer is the co-founder and CEO of Didero, a New York company building agentic AI that sits on top of enterprise ERP systems and automates the email-and-phone-call grind of global procurement. He got the idea running Markai, an e-commerce startup he operated across Asia during the pandemic and sold in 2023, where thousands of suppliers and dozens of countries taught him how much of global trade still runs on people manually chasing purchase orders. He founded Didero in December 2023 with McKinsey procurement veteran Lorenz Pallhuber and engineer Tom Petit, and in early 2026 raised a $30 million Series A co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with Microsoft's M12 participating.
Jarren Reid
Jarren Reid is the 21-year-old CEO and co-founder of Usul, a Y Combinator (S24) startup building an AI platform that helps companies find, pursue, and win government contracts. Usul monitors roughly $8 trillion in annual government spending across 60+ nations, matching companies to opportunities in defense, IT, energy, and healthcare. Reid worked for defense contractors including Palantir and MITRE while still young, dropped out of Stanford to build Usul after seeing how broken the acquisition process was, and has become one of the youngest CEOs working with the U.S. government today.
Amar Amte
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
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
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.
Alexander Kates
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
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.
Tom Petit
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
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
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
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.
Sath Sivasothy
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.
Akash Talyan
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
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
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
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.
Mohamed Batterjee
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
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
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
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.
James McGillicuddy
James McGillicuddy is the CEO and Co-founder of BRM (Buyer Relationship Management), a San Francisco-based AI-powered vendor management and procurement automation platform. After key early roles at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce for $390M), Sourcegraph (valued at $2.6B), and Carta (where he led CartaX), McGillicuddy co-founded BRM in May 2022 to rebalance the power dynamic between buyers and their vendors. BRM raised $21.6M in total funding - a $6M seed from Base10 Partners and a $15M Series A led by Caffeinated Capital in December 2024 - and serves customers including Deel and Cadence with AI SuperAgents that automate vendor discovery, contract extraction, compliance monitoring, and negotiation.
Vinod Devan
Vinod Devan is a senior technology executive and strategic operator who has built partner ecosystems and commercial organizations at the intersection of enterprise AI, SaaS, and consulting. With a career spanning Strategy&, Deloitte, Confluent (through its 2021 IPO), Globality, Cohere, and most recently Ema Unlimited as Chief Commercial Officer, Devan brings a rare combination of engineering depth, management consulting rigor, and hands-on go-to-market execution to high-growth AI companies.
Jayant Kulkarni
Jayant Kulkarni is the CEO and co-founder of Quartzy, the world's leading lab management platform serving over 400,000 researchers across 25,000+ organizations. A PhD-trained control systems engineer from Cornell University and alumnus of IIT Madras, Kulkarni co-founded Quartzy in 2011 after completing a Swartz Fellowship at Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. The company - named after the highest-scoring word in Scrabble - went through Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch and has grown into a vertically integrated procurement and inventory platform for life sciences, raising $23 million in April 2026 from Avenue Capital Group and BroadOak Capital Partners.
Jay Nath
Jay Nath is Co-CEO and co-founder of Authorium, an AI-powered government procurement and document workflow platform that processes over $50 billion in government transactions. Before Authorium, he served as San Francisco's first Chief Innovation Officer for nearly a decade, where he created landmark programs including Startup in Residence (STIR), Civic Bridge, and Open311 — the nation's first read-write open data standard for 311 systems, adopted by over 50 cities worldwide. Recognized by the Obama White House as a Champion of Change, Nath has spent his career bridging the gap between Silicon Valley agility and the scale of public sector impact.
Joel Hyatt
Joel Hyatt is Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder of Globality, Inc., an AI-powered autonomous sourcing platform serving Fortune 500 enterprises. A serial entrepreneur who pioneered affordable legal services through Hyatt Legal Services in the 1970s and co-founded Current TV with Al Gore in 2005 (sold to Al Jazeera for $500M in 2013), Hyatt has spent five decades disrupting incumbent industries. Globality, founded in 2015 with co-founder Lior Delgo, has raised $357M and deploys AI agents to help enterprises reduce procurement costs by 10-20% while capturing 60-90% operational efficiency gains.
Rujul Zaparde
Rujul Zaparde is the co-founder and CEO of Zip, the $2.2 billion AI platform for enterprise procurement trusted by OpenAI, Anthropic, Snowflake, and hundreds of leading enterprises. A serial entrepreneur who dropped out of Harvard at 17 to co-found FlightCar (acquired by Mercedes-Benz in 2016), he later joined Airbnb as a product manager and served as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator before launching Zip in 2020. Under his leadership, Zip has raised $371 million in funding, processes over $107 billion in spend, and manages 3.9 million suppliers, while enabling over $4.4 billion in customer savings. He also co-founded Drinking Water for India, building 50+ wells serving 100,000+ people.