VALDERA were still sourcing chemicals through manual processes, outdated supplier databases, and word of mouth. The industry had digitised nearly every other function, but procurement of the actual inputs that make products was still stuck in a previous era.
“ Every product that people interact with on a daily basis is made of chemicals and raw materials, but the industry has a massive gap when it comes to actually sourcing them intelligently,” Sruti explains.“ After COVID emptied shelves and geopolitical disruptions kept compounding, it became clear that the old ways of working just were not going to cut it anymore.”
The timing was deliberate. The pandemic had exposed just how fragile single-threaded supply chains really were. Manufacturers who had relied on the same handful of suppliers for years suddenly found themselves scrambling, with no systematic way to identify, qualify, or engage alternatives at speed. Sruti and Dheev saw an opportunity to apply modern data science and AI to a problem that the industry had been brute-forcing for decades.
What Valdera actually does Valdera is the AI operating system for chemical and raw material procurement. It is not a marketplace, and it is not a distributor. It is a workspace built around how procurement teams actually work – bringing together three integrated layers: category management to pinpoint where spend, risk, and opportunity sit; market intelligence to track pricing,
“Traditional sourcing methods, like Googling one supplier at a time, just are not going to work in today’ s environment”
Sruti Arulmani Co-Founder & CEO Valdera
supply, and trade signals without going to market; and a sourcing platform that matches buyers with qualified suppliers worldwide based on their exact material requirements. All three are powered by data science, machine learning and AI, and built specifically for chemicals.
The scale of the platform tells the story. Its proprietary database maps over 400,000 suppliers and 1.7 million CAS numbers across 150 countries. When a procurement team is ready to source a material, Valdera’ s domain-trained AI matches them with the best-fit suppliers based on capability, geography, certifications, regulatory compliance and pricing, then automates the RFQ process from first contact through to quote comparison. The results have been substantial. Across its customer base, Valdera has delivered average cost savings of 14 %, shortened product launch timelines by 30 to 40 %, and enabled manufacturers to expand their qualified supplier networks by two to three times. For procurement leaders under pressure to reduce costs, derisk their supply base and accelerate
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