Art of Procurement’s Startup of the Week series spotlights the tech startups that are reshaping the digital procurement ecosystem.
In this episode, host Jyothi Hartley speaks with Ricky Ho, co-founder and CEO of SourceReady, to explore how their AI-powered platform helps teams streamline sourcing, improve supplier discovery, and make smarter decisions… faster.
Below is a Q&A recap of their conversation:
What parts of the sourcing process are you most focused on automating?
“There are three parts that we help automate: Number one is supplier discovery. And this is the space where we feel like a lot of great manufacturers globally are actually very hard to find, partially because a lot of the data that exists about these manufacturers is very fragmented and oftentimes actually not available to the general public.
Second is supply chain optimization. Because of tariffs, every importer and sourcing team is thinking about how they can lower their costs. How can they look for new regions to source?
And then third, and I think the most important part, is actually automating a lot of the repetitive work that happens in sourcing, especially regarding supplier communication and negotiation.”
What was the “aha moment” that made you want to solve this problem?
“I was looking at how people currently discover suppliers, and the most popular digital way people do this today is going to directories. If we think about what the next evolution in supplier discovery is, I don't believe the directory model is the best product for the buyer.
The biggest gap is that there are so many different tools and systems that help solve process management, but if you actually talk to people in sourcing, what you realize is that despite having these systems, a lot of the highest value aspects of procurement and sourcing (which is essentially identifying the right supplier, the right sourcing strategy, and negotiation)... these things actually don't happen in ERPs.
These are all unstructured processes that happen offline. They find suppliers by going to trade shows or asking around. They negotiate over email. They calculate tariffs in Excel sheets and even go to ChatGPT.”
What early customer feedback has shaped the product the most?
“A lot of our customers want to know more about the potential suppliers that they want to work with. They don't want just surface-level data. They want to understand what the risks are of working with the supplier. Does the supplier have any compliance issues? Are they being sanctioned?”
So I think supplier traceability and compliance is something that many procurement and sourcing teams are going to be a lot more risk-averse on and a lot more aware of.”
What has surprised you most about building a procurement startup?
“I'm quite surprised because I feel like supplier discovery seems to be a common problem that a lot of sourcing and procurement teams have, but there doesn't seem to be that many companies going after this space compared to other verticals or other horizontal spaces.”
What ROI are customers typically looking for?
“One is direct savings from sourcing and procurement. It's the ability to actually optimize the supply chain, to find suppliers in lower tariff countries, or create a more competitive bidding process.”
The second part is more from an overhead perspective. So right now, what we've seen in the industry is that the complexity of doing global trade is increasing because of these tariffs, because of the uncertainty in the world. But I think, for most companies, they don't have the ability to just increase headcount by 50%. So the workload is increasing by 50%, but the headcount is not keeping up.
This is where we think AI has a huge potential to help existing teams automate a lot of the work that they shouldn't be spending time on, so they can spend time on the higher value aspects of sourcing and procurement.”
To learn more about SourceReady, visit their profile page in the AOP Provider Directory.