“Supply chains are going to get more complex. As we adopt more agents, there's going to be more coordination, not just between humans but between bots and humans and bots themselves.” - Nick Gospodinov, Founder and CEO, Mandel AI
Procurement teams spend countless hours managing supplier communication. Quotations, order confirmations, shipment updates, production delays, and invoice discrepancies often live across a disconnected ecosystem of inboxes, spreadsheets, and documents long before they ever make it into a system of record.
As supply chains become more complex (not to mention volatile), keeping track of all that information (so that procurement can act on it quickly) has become increasingly difficult.
In this Startup of the Week conversation, we speak with Nick Gospodinov, Founder and CEO of Mandel AI, about why he believes the communication layer is one of the biggest untapped opportunities in procurement. We discuss the realities and challenges of communication in direct procurement, the difficulties and nuances around successful AI adoption, and how agentic systems can help procurement coordinate activity, surface disruptions earlier, and reduce the manual work that sits between suppliers and internal systems.
What inspired you to start Mandel AI?
"I was very surprised because I thought that this is a problem that programmatically could be solved by me connecting with an API on the supplier side.
But it happens so that even the largest companies in the world still have the majority of the work happen outside of the ERP rather than in it. That would usually be an email, a spreadsheet, or a PDF that arrived a couple of hours ago. So it's a lot of manual tasks that need to be done. That's what large language models could solve."
What makes Mandel AI different from other AI solutions in procurement?
"A lot of the players focus on the already existing ERP workflows, just enhanced with AI. The biggest difference is that we focus on the communication layer in the first place. We treat the first source of information in the company when it comes to supply chain procurement as the communication layer rather than the ERP. Usually, you first get it from the communication layer, which is either emails, meeting notes, or anything else. Then you bring it back into the ERP where you actually work with that data."
What gives you confidence that you're solving the right problem?
"Somebody needs to solve the coordination problem. For 50 years, we've been solving this with supplier portals, with EDI, and even with RPAs. But that's kind of forcing the other side to do something for me. We have these systems now with AI that can actually parse natural language, understand it, act on it, and shift that data from one system to another. So why not have that orchestrator in place for both sides?"
What has surprised you most about building a procurement startup?
"Agent adoption is extremely low right now. People are still very early on the journey in terms of adoption in supply chain procurement. People are still at the level of simple copilots, maybe have integrated Microsoft Copilot in their company.
Now everyone is pitching multi-agent systems and very complex things. I think for a procurement professional, their head is just going to explode from all that information. It's about simplicity now and simplifying these kinds of things and making rapid deployments."
Where does Mandel AI fit within the procurement technology stack?
"Our system starts where all the other systems end. The moment that the purchase order goes out, everything is chaos.
It would be supplier chasing, understanding if there's a backorder and we need to react, checking whether milestones are being met, whether production has finished, and whether shipments need to be split. That's where all of these systems end. And the problem has never been solved. So that's where we start."*
What is the most underrated capability within the platform?
"Probably the escalation system.
One supplier was emailing that they were about to apply a surcharge because of tariffs. The agent went online, checked for tariff exemptions, and discovered there was an exemption for another three weeks. It escalated to a person and said this supplier can't be surcharging you next week if it's justified by the tariffs.
We also worked with a pharmaceutical distributor where the supplier sent back a six-million-euro invoice. The agent remembered a previously negotiated discount that wasn't reflected on the invoice. We found a one percent price discrepancy. That was sixty thousand euros surfaced immediately to the buyer."
To learn more about Mandel AI, visit their dedicated provider page on the Art of Procurement website.