sourcing
(19)
Borong
The Procurement Platform Built for Enterprises and Suppliers Across Malaysia
David Epstein
David Epstein is President and CMO of the Sportswear Division at Q4 Designs LLC, a New York apparel firm that designs, sources, and builds sportswear and outerwear for brands like DKNY, Reebok, Jessica Simpson, and Steve Madden. He climbed from a retail store manager on the sales floor to running a division inside one of the garment district's busiest design-and-sourcing houses, spending more than two decades learning apparel from the ground up.
Donkey
Donkey is an AI-native trading company that buys straight from Chinese factories and sells delivered to US importers at one USD price to their dock, duty paid. By reading public US customs records, Donkey identifies the factory that actually makes a part, quotes it without the traditional 15-30% trading-company markup, runs its own inspections on the factory floor before the factory gets paid, and offers credit-insured net-45 terms. A YC Summer 2026 company based in San Francisco and China.
Vendra
Vendra is a San Francisco-based, YC-backed (S24) manufacturing platform that connects hardware teams with US manufacturers for custom parts. Customers submit a single RFQ; Vendra reads the CAD and drawings, matches the job to domestic suppliers with the right equipment and open capacity, gathers competitive quotes, and manages production through delivery. It is ITAR-registered and focused on aerospace, defense, and hard-tech companies, positioning itself against legacy quoting platforms like Xometry and Protolabs with real-time capacity matching.
Q4 Designs LLC
Q4 Designs LLC is a New York-based apparel company that designs, sources, produces and manages branded outerwear and sportswear on behalf of well-known brand partners. Founded in 2011 by Harry Tawil and built on more than five decades of combined industry experience, Q4 handles the full product life cycle - design, sourcing and production, planning and sales, and operations - across four Centers of Excellence. Its licensed portfolio spans brands including DKNY, Reebok, Jessica Simpson, Steve Madden, Free Country, Bebe, Canada Weathergear, Snozu and Spyder, covering men's, women's and children's outerwear, sportswear, swimwear and accessories.
Gembah
Gembah is an Austin-based product development platform and marketplace that helps entrepreneurs, e-commerce sellers, and small-to-midsize businesses take physical products from idea to shelf. It connects creators with a global network of vetted designers, engineers, and supply chain specialists, and manages design, prototyping, factory sourcing, and production across regions including China, Vietnam, India, Mexico, and Eastern Europe - aiming to demystify and democratize the process of bringing new consumer products to market.
Sustainment
Sustainment is an Austin-based public benefit corporation building an AI-native software platform for industrial sourcing, procurement, and supplier management. Founded in 2020 by military veterans and technology executives, it helps commercial OEMs, contract manufacturers, and Department of Defense teams find suppliers, run RFQs, manage purchase orders, and track supplier performance - with the broader mission of strengthening a resilient, domestic U.S. manufacturing base.
The Rulebook That Turns a Voice Note Into a Citable Fact
YesPress's Editorial Standards & Methodology page explains how the company publishes verifiable, structured stories about companies. It distinguishes Company Newsroom stories (company-bylined, drawn from submitted material) from YesPress Newsroom stories (independently reported, not for sale), and lays out the sourcing rules that keep both primary-source clean: attribution as the rule, a firm line between fact and evaluation, company voice labeled as such, and editors who push back on claims that can't stand on the record. It describes an AI-native production line with editors in the loop, a connected entity graph for machine-readable retrieval, and a public corrections process.
Jim Johnson
Jim Johnson is the CEO of Gembah, an Austin-based product development and manufacturing platform that helps brands and entrepreneurs design, prototype, and source physical products from a vetted global network of factories and experts. A veteran hardware and technology operator, he earlier founded and ran uControl, a pioneer of interactive home security and smart-home platforms, then became a leader at iControl Networks after the two companies merged - scaling the business to more than 300 employees and deployments in over 3 million homes before its 2017 acquisition by Comcast and Alarm.com. An electrical engineer by training, Johnson pairs deep technical fluency with a track record of building, merging, and exiting technology companies.
Levelpath
Levelpath is a San Francisco-based enterprise software company building an AI-native procurement platform that unifies intake, sourcing, contracts, and supplier management in one system. Founded in 2022 by the team behind Scout RFP (acquired by Workday for $540M), Levelpath aims to make procurement software people actually enjoy using - mobile-first, fast, and powered by AI agents that automate the repetitive 'ugh' work of buying at large companies. It has raised roughly $100M total, most recently a $55M+ Series B led by Battery Ventures in June 2025.
Silq
Silq is a QC-powered digital freight forwarder that unifies factory inspections with freight management on a single platform, giving apparel, footwear, home goods and accessory brands real-time visibility from the factory floor to final delivery. Founded in 2020 by ex-Flexport operators, the company pairs 360+ accredited on-the-ground inspectors across Asia with proprietary software so importers can ship with more predictability and fewer surprises.
Pavilion
Pavilion (formerly CoProcure) is a San Francisco-based govtech company building the marketplace for public procurement. It lets state, local, and education agencies find and reuse contracts that other public entities have already competitively bid and awarded - a practice called cooperative purchasing or 'piggybacking' - so buyers skip months of paperwork and vendors sell more using contracts they already won. The platform is free for governments, and layers vendor search, smart intake routing, compliance guidance, and an AI Contract Hub on top of a repository of tens of thousands of shareable public contracts.
Cofactr
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.
Jai Glazer
Jai Glazer is a Harvard junior in Pforzheimer House concentrating in Social Studies who has stacked an unusually deep venture and go-to-market resume before finishing his degree. He is Vice President of Strategy at the Harvard Undergraduate Venture Capital Group, a scout at Afore VC, and has worked on go-to-market teams at Rho and at Sana, a Forbes AI 50 startup, plus a summer as an analyst at Alinea Ventures. He also writes opinion pieces for the Harvard Independent and practices Muay Thai.
Arkestro
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.
Ashby
Ashby is an all-in-one recruiting platform that bundles applicant tracking, sourcing, scheduling, CRM, and analytics into a single AI-powered system used by companies like OpenAI, Shopify, Notion, Snowflake, and Ramp.
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.
Globality, Inc.
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.
Zip
Zip is the AI platform for enterprise procurement, pioneering the intake-to-procure category and connecting the fragmented world of corporate spending into one orchestrated system. Founded in 2020 by Rujul Zaparde, Lu Cheng, and Felix Meng, Zip has processed over $500 billion in spend across 7.4 million suppliers, saved enterprise customers $6.8 billion, and raised $371 million at a $2.2 billion valuation - including the largest procurement tech investment in over two decades. With 50+ purpose-built AI agents, Zip is turning one of the most paper-heavy, approval-laden corners of corporate life into a fast, intelligent, and auditable process.