In this episode of AOP Introducing, Helen Mackenzie speaks with Rasa Raoufi, founder of Mithra Ai, a B2B SaaS company that empowers procurement teams to create and execute spend category strategies built on a solid data foundation. Rasa has over a decade of experience leading procurement transformations, and in this conversation, he shares how he transitioned from supply chain design to procurement, where he discovered a critical gap in the market that inspired him to create Mithra Ai.
Mithra Ai captures both structured and unstructured data across the business, enriches it, and gives procurement teams the visibility and insights they need to improve decision making and optimize their category strategies. Through taxonomy management and data enrichment, Mithra Ai focuses on providing procurement with foundational data and alleviating some of procurement’s most tedious and error-prone tasks.
Before founding Mithra Ai, said Rasa, “cleaning data was becoming taboo, data quality was becoming taboo, and it was an activity that was no fun for anyone and most of the time it was expensive. It was a tedious activity that usually cost a lot of money, and the end result was never good enough. This is where Mithra Ai could bridge that gap.”
After working in data analytics for procurement organizations, Rasa was inspired to create Mithra Ai in 2020 because of ongoing challenges around data quality and the ability to provide insights across the different stakeholder groups.
One of Mithra Ai’s key differentiators is its focus on procurement taxonomy, which Rasa describes as the “DNA of the procurement team.” Unlike other approaches that force data to fit rigid existing structures, Mithra Ai helps businesses create and maintain unique procurement taxonomies that are tailored to the specific needs of stakeholders and the business.
“We see procurement taxonomy as the DNA of a procurement team; it's the DNA of an organization because what the procurement team is buying – whether it's a direct or indirect services or products – is basically those components or key services that is being utilized to generate the final package of the product or service that is being submitted to the market,” said Rasa. “And we believe that every organization should have their own procurement taxonomy that is reflective of the product or services requirements and what they are getting from the supply base.”
