He ran a company that nearly drowned in supplier emails. Then he built AI agents to read them.
Tim Spencer, outdoors, in the cap-and-sunglasses uniform of a founder who is not, at this exact moment, chasing a purchase order. The chasing is what Didero was built to end.
Tim Spencer is the co-founder and CEO of Didero, a New York company that puts a thin, agentic layer of AI on top of the ERP systems manufacturers and distributors already use. The pitch is not a new database. It is a coordinator that reads the messages coming in and quietly does the work around them.
That framing matters, because Spencer's central observation is unglamorous and probably correct: enterprise software has spent decades perfecting the system of record, and almost none of that work touched the part where a human sits at a keyboard emailing a supplier in Shenzhen to ask where the order is. "Global trade runs on natural language communication," he says. "It's emails, WeChat, phone calls, purchase orders, and packing lists." The SAP install was never the bottleneck. The person retyping the packing list into the SAP install was.
So Didero's agents integrate into a company's existing systems and communication channels, build up context on products, pricing, policies, and past orders, and then take over the day-to-day operational work - supplier communication, order tracking, exception handling. Within weeks of deployment, the company says, the agents are executing critical procurement tasks on their own. The stated end state is almost aggressively simple. "The goal," Spencer says, "is to go from 'I need a good' to payment without having to lift a finger."
Didero describes what it does with a sports metaphor that doubles as reassurance to the humans it is automating around: let Didero play defense, so your team can go on offense. The agents chase the emails and the exceptions; the people are freed for the negotiations and the strategy. Whether that division of labor holds is one of the more interesting open questions in enterprise AI, and Spencer is betting a company on the answer being yes.
Founded December 2023 in New York. An agentic AI system for supply chains and procurement that aims to handle up to 90% of the manual work in source-to-pay workflows - without replacing the underlying ERP.
Co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with participation from M12, Microsoft's venture fund. Total funding to date roughly $37M. Capital earmarked for product development and go-to-market expansion.
"I found myself running this big team that was not really set up for success."
// Tim Spencer, on the Markai years that became the Didero thesis
Most founders arrive at their market through a slide deck. Spencer arrived through a headache. During the pandemic he was running Markai, an e-commerce startup operating across Asia, and at its scale that meant thousands of suppliers and distribution into dozens of countries. Somebody had to source those suppliers, negotiate the pricing, track the orders, and manage the payments, and a great deal of that somebody was a team he had assembled and then watched get buried.
The complexity was manual in the most literal sense - work done by hands, one email and one spreadsheet cell at a time. Spencer's line about it is not triumphant. It is the sound of a manager who had seen his people set up to fail through no fault of their own. He sold Markai in 2023.
The timing is the part worth noticing. He exited just as it was becoming clear that generative AI could finally read the messy, unstructured language that procurement floats on - the WeChat threads, the PDF invoices, the packing lists. The pain he had just spent years inside became, almost overnight, a solvable problem. He did not wait around. In December 2023 he started Didero.
He did not start it alone. Spencer co-founded Didero with Lorenz Pallhuber, a veteran of McKinsey's procurement practice who brought the domain depth, and Tom Petit, the former technical co-founder of Landis, who brought the engineering. It is a familiar and durable startup shape: the operator who felt the pain, the consultant who has seen it across dozens of companies, and the builder who can turn the diagnosis into software.
Tim Spencer - CEO. The operator who lived procurement chaos at Markai.
Lorenz Pallhuber - McKinsey procurement veteran. The domain depth.
Tom Petit - former technical co-founder of Landis. The engineering.
Spencer studied at NYU's Stern School of Business and later at Stanford's Graduate School of Business - the second of which makes Didero, in the local vernacular, his repeat-founder act.
Founds and runs Markai, an e-commerce startup spanning Asia - thousands of suppliers, dozens of countries, and a team overwhelmed by the manual work of it all.
Sells Markai, just as generative AI starts to make the procurement pain he lived look automatable.
Co-founds Didero with Lorenz Pallhuber and Tom Petit.
Didero announces a $30M Series A, co-led by Chemistry and Headline with Microsoft's M12 participating.
Didero passes 30 customers among manufacturers and distributors, with a team of roughly 42.
"Global trade runs on natural language communication. It's emails, WeChat, phone calls, purchase orders, and packing lists."
"The goal is to go from 'I need a good' to payment without having to lift a finger."
"Procurement teams are being asked to manage increasingly complex supply chains with tools that were never designed for the pace or scale of today's trade."
"Didero's AI agents handle the day-to-day operational work of procurement, allowing teams to spend less time chasing emails and exceptions and more time focusing on strategic decisions."
Didero deliberately layers over existing ERP systems rather than trying to unseat SAP or Oracle. The agent reads incoming communications and executes the necessary updates in the tools a company already runs.
Spencer's core insight is that the real system of record for procurement has always been unstructured messages. Reading those is exactly what generative AI unlocked - and what makes the timing his.
The framing is "let Didero play defense, so your team can go on offense." Agents take the chasing; people keep the strategic decisions and stay in control.
Customers including sustainable-packaging maker Footprint report the platform executing critical procurement tasks autonomously within weeks of deployment.
M12, Microsoft's venture fund, joined Chemistry and Headline in the $30M Series A - a signal about where large incumbents think agentic enterprise workflows are heading.
In under two years, Didero embedded with more than 30 manufacturer and distributor customers modernizing procurement across complex, multi-region supply chains.
"Global trade runs on natural language communication."
// The one-line thesis behind Didero's agents
Didero's whole product philosophy compresses into six words: "Let Didero play defense, so your team can go on offense."
Spencer talks about global trade as running on WeChat messages and packing lists as much as on any formal software - a very field-tested view of enterprise reality.
He is a repeat Stanford GSB entrepreneur. Didero is his second turn as founder-CEO, after Markai.
Didero refuses the rip-and-replace playbook. It sits on top of the ERP a company already paid for, rather than asking them to switch.
The idea came from failure lived, not spotted - Spencer built the fix for the exact team he once watched get buried at Markai.
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.
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