rfq-automation
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LightSource and the $30 Billion Spreadsheet
At Tesla, Spencer Penn watched car parts move through spreadsheets and email. LightSource is his attempt to give the people buying those parts a record that survives the next design change.
Fairmarkit Found Billions Hiding in the Purchases Nobody Wanted to Touch
Fairmarkit started with the corporate purchases too small and tedious for anyone to love. Now its AI agents run sourcing work from intake to award - and customers say the bigger prize is not merely savings, but time.
Paperless Parts Is Turning the Quote Desk Into Manufacturing's Control Room
A machine shop can make a perfect part and still lose money because the quote was wrong. Paperless Parts is building the software layer that catches the expensive details before metal meets machine.
Part Analytics Bet Procurement Teams Were Done With Spreadsheets - Then Customers Rewrote the Product
Two former GE HealthCare operators built the electronics sourcing system they wished they had. Their useful trick was letting early customers pull it from a BOM tool into a broader operating layer for procurement - and the reported results explain why Altium bought it.
Mercura
Mercura is a Munich-based YC W25 startup building AI software that turns messy sales requests - emails, tender specs, phone calls - into structured, spec-compliant quotes and orders for industrial distributors and manufacturers. It reads unstructured inquiries, matches them to catalog products, prioritizes margin, and pushes the result straight into a customer's ERP.
Spaceflow
Spaceflow is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator S26) that makes enterprises 'agent-native.' Instead of selling companies another dashboard, it turns the systems they already run - ERP, email, spreadsheets - into a 'company brain' that AI employees and any MCP agent can read and operate securely, with a human keeping the final say. It starts with procurement and supply chain, where it has processed roughly $400M in annual supplier spend and reached six-figure ARR while in early stage.
penny.
penny. is a Saudi-based B2B SaaS company that digitizes the full source-to-pay procurement cycle on one cloud platform. It combines e-sourcing, RFQs, purchase orders, supplier management, spend analytics and AI-driven automation so enterprises can cut costs, tighten governance and speed up buying. The modular, customizable system is used by companies across 75+ countries and is layered with AI tools like the Bidly.ai sourcing assistant to make procurement faster and more transparent.