Didero, a New York startup that provides artificial intelligence (AI) agents for procurement tasks, has acquired fellow software vendor Covalent AI, which makes AI-powered purchasing solutions, the firm said.
According to Didero, the combined technologies will bolster its customers’ ability to use agentic AI to fully automate supply chain and procurement operations from source to pay. And that approach could enable users to “put their supply chains on autopilot,” a powerful approach at a time when many businesses are looking for ways to navigate tariff uncertainty in an increasingly unpredictable trade landscape.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But Didero was founded in 2023, has raised $7 million of venture capital in a seed round, and this marks its first acquisition.
Also founded in 2023, Covalent AI says its platform automates 80% of purchasing tasks for procurement and supply chain teams, and takes actions to help reduce disruptions and delays before they escalate.
In a briefing, Didero co-founder Tom Petit said the system works by using a large language model (LLM) to pull data from a wide range of business communication types, and then adds that data to a customer’s enterprise resource planning (ERP), warehouse management system (WMS), or other software platform, using an application programming interface (API).
Armed with all that data, the firm’s AI agents can take actions on behalf of users, automating tasks such as sourcing, supplier management, purchase order management, and invoices. For example, if a user asked Didero to source a certain item, those AI agents could send 10 or 20 emails to various suppliers on the company’s behalf. It could then onboard the chosen supplier, track purchase orders and shipment notifications, compare received shipments to what was expected, fix any discrepancies, and match invoices.
Despite that powerful potential, a new Didero installation typically begins with a large portion of “human in the loop” processes, Petit said. That means it asks existing employees to approve its recommendations before acting on them. Over time, the Didero system learns the preferences and terminologies of individual teams and companies. And when those users are comfortable with its patterns, they can allow the system to automate larger parts of the workflow.
Adding Covalent to that approach extends the system’s capabilities to purchase order management, in addition to Didero’s original focus on sourcing. “Our acquisition of Covalent strengthens our AI agents’ purchase order lifecycle management capabilities—the critical link for true end-to-end automation,” Mohamed Barakat, Head of Product at Didero, said in a release. “We’ve helped customers reduce lead times by 30% and achieve improved accuracy on invoice reconciliation. This allows procurement teams to automate up to 90% of routine tasks and focus on strategic initiatives that improve margins.”
