Raleigh, NC based Beroe announced its $34 million raise last week, led by Relativity Resilience Fund with participation from investors including Mukul Agrawal and Alchemy Long Term Ventures. For founder and CEO Vel Dhinagaravel, the round is fuel for a longer journey: building an AI-first procurement intelligence stack that doesn’t just report on markets but actively helps companies act on them.
“From 2006 to 2016, everything we did was custom research-very bespoke, very tailored,” Dhinagaravel said in an interview with AIM Media House. “In 2017 we launched Beroe Live, which has now evolved to Beroe Live.ai. From 2020 onwards, we put a lot of investment into Abby, our AI bot. Customers very quickly started gravitating towards Abby as the primary interface rather than going with the more traditional UI.”
That shift was telling. Long before ChatGPT captured the public imagination, Beroe’s customers were showing a preference for conversational systems over dashboards. “The conversational system of asking a question and getting an answer people seem to find much more helpful than just going through a variety of screens and clicking through,” Dhinagaravel said. That adoption pushed the company to “significantly up the amount of investment from an AI perspective” and retool its stack into what he calls an “AI-centric” foundation.
Assembling the AI Procurement Stack
The new funding comes at a time when Beroe has been piecing together that foundation through both internal development and acquisitions. In March, it acquired Berlin-based nnamu, a negotiation platform built on game theory that can autonomously bargain with suppliers. Six months later, Beroe picked up Forestreet, a London startup specializing in AI-powered supplier discovery. Both were born “AI-native,” and became key accelerants in Beroe’s own pivot.
“The vision for our procurement intelligence stack has always been to assemble the different pieces,” he said. “In some cases we’ve been building those blocks internally, in some cases making acquisitions. This funding will help us accelerate that because we’ll be able to make maybe even larger acquisitions than what we have done in the past, and also increase the size of our technology and product teams to get this new stack to market faster.”
Beroe’s model sits at the intersection of external and internal procurement data. Historically, the company gave clients visibility into global supply dynamics, whether steel prices were climbing or plastics capacity was tightening. Now it’s layering in customers’ internal data, such as spend, supplier performance, and inventory, and tying it to external signals in real time. “If the price in the market has dropped but internally the price has not changed, then that’s an insight we should be able to provide,” Dhinagaravel explained.
This real-time feedback loop links directly to nnamu’s autonomous negotiation engine. As he put it: “Once you find an opportunity, the procurement manager can then click a button and say hey, nnamu can you just go negotiate with the supplier on my behalf.”
The ambition is an end-to-end system, where intelligence isn’t siloed in reports but actively feeds into procurement actions.
Differentiating from Incumbents
Beroe is not alone in trying to modernize procurement. Larger players such as SAP Ariba, Coupa, and Ivalua offer broad procurement suites, while consulting firms like EY and Kearney package advisory with tech integrations. Beroe’s pitch is that its AI-first, data-rich approach creates a distinct advantage: not a monolithic platform but an ecosystem of interoperable intelligence services.
That ecosystem already supports over 1,000 enterprise customers, including more than 300 Fortune 500 companies. Microsoft has become a key partner, with Beroe’s AI assistant Abi now integrated into the Microsoft Copilot Store and Teams, making procurement intelligence available directly within enterprise workflows.
The question for Beroe is whether this approach can scale in ways that the larger suites cannot. Dhinagaravel believes the industry is at an inflection point. AI, he argues, is changing procurement from a process of “discrete optimization”, renegotiating contracts once every year or two, into something closer to continuous optimization. “The AI tools available to the procurement manager can almost be like an exoskeleton that gives them 100x or 1000x the capacity they would have had earlier,” he said. That shift also changes the economics of procurement: “Where five years ago somebody might not have pursued a $10,000 savings opportunity, with AI even a $100 opportunity becomes viable.”
Procurement’s Shifting Role
The funding round is also a validation of Beroe’s place in what has become a strategically sensitive function. Procurement has shifted from a back-office concern to a frontline response to volatility: pandemic supply shocks, geopolitical trade shifts, and inflationary cost pressures. In that environment, tools that help procurement managers act quickly carry more weight.
“Beroe has built a differentiated and scalable procurement intelligence ecosystem that is redefining how global enterprises approach sourcing,” said Ramprasad Mathrubutham of InCred Capital, which advised on the transaction.
Dhinagaravel puts it more plainly: “Procurement managers believe they can optimize on a close to continuous basis now. The ambition of the extent of optimization is getting reset.”
For Beroe, the $34 million will be used to deepen its AI capabilities, expand integrations, and pursue targeted acquisitions. The capital won’t make the procurement market any less competitive, but it may help the company solidify its position as a credible alternative to the incumbents: one designed for a future where sourcing intelligence is more about acting on it in real time.
