Inside Beroe’s $34M Raise: Building the Future of Procurement

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.