Successful businesses are only as good as the partnerships they foster. 

In the challenging, fast-paced business environment of today, going it alone is a dangerous road to take. Key, strategic relationships are built on a foundation of being mutually beneficial, collaborative and filled with trust. For Valdera and Toray Industries, the two companies exemplify what it means to be a good business partner. 

Founded by brother and sister Dheev and Sruti Arulmani, Valdera is an AI-native sourcing platform that streamlines the process of buying and selling quality chemicals and raw materials. Its platform brings buyers, suppliers, brands, manufacturers and producers globally together and ensures the products that make the world go round get developed quickly, sustainably and to the best quality. Toray Industries is an integrated chemical group which fuses nanotechnology into operations, using organic synthetic chemistry, polymer chemistry and biotechnology as its core technologies.

At DPW Amsterdam 2025, Dheev Arulmani, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Valdera and John Eustis, Chief Procurement Officer at Toray Industries, sit down with CPOstrategy to reveal exactly what makes their business relationship tick.

Developing the Valdera – Toray Industries partnership

When Toray began looking for procurement technology to leverage, Eustis stresses the necessity of solving the business problem first and foremost. While Toray possessed numerous long-standing relationships and had great market knowledge, where they had a gap was within the mid-range chemicals space – which is what led them to Valdera’s door. “We buy a lot of specialty chemicals, single sourced items that the team just didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on and really understand the market,” says Eustis. “When we first started talking to Valdera, we saw an opportunity to address that blind spot. It’s been a great opportunity for us to partner and evaluate sources of supply we didn’t even know existed and makes it much more efficient for the buying community at Toray.”

“When we built the business about five years ago, John was one of the first people that I met through the MIT alumni network,” Arulmani reveals. “Toray were one of the first organisations to say, ‘Hey, we believe in this technology, we believe in the direction of AI and data science and how that’s going to shape the future of procurement organisation for manufacturers.’ We’ve partnered together over the last three or four years, and since then every year we’ve thought about what the next chapter of the partnership could look like.”

Eustis adds that Valdera’s ability to take the time to listen to each specific problem and work on finding the right solution sets its solution apart. “I think it’s a great partnership and we love to work with tech providers that really work to understand your needs and evolve the platform to meet the requirements,” he adds. “I think the relationship has lasted this long because Valdera does a brilliant job doing that and we look forward to working together more in the future.”

Making tech work

The primary theme from this year’s DPW Amsterdam was the notion of putting AI to work. With advanced technologies such as agentic AI pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in procurement and supply chain, the time is now to drive real change within organisations and unlock unprecedented time and cost savings. According to Arulmani, the chemical and manufacturing industries are facing increasingly complex global supply chains, where volatility, multi-tier supplier networks, and rising sustainability pressures make it essential to harness technology.

“The industry is still extremely antiquated,” Arulmani explains. “Many companies are still manually comparing spec sheets and emailing suppliers for data. At Valdera, we see a much more modern and AI driven way to manage this process. By applying artificial intelligence to the vast amount of existing data across internal systems and external sources, we can digitise the entire sourcing workflow from identifying suppliers to analysing quotes and make it dramatically faster and smarter.”

Eustis believes that as an operating company, Toray must free up its procurement team to drive greater strategic value instead of being siloed with mundane roles that agentic AI can help with. “Agentic AI is the future and we must leverage it to automate and streamline those basic tasks that humans have done for however long,” explains Eustis. “Agentic AI allows humans to do much more important things such as focus on supply relationship management strategy and improve the value creation process for procurement within the organisation.

“For us, it’s about how do we solve the business challenges that we have? AI is in the forefront of everyone’s mind, but it’s really about how we enable AI to solve real world business problems. Partnering with Valdera is one opportunity for us, but also coming to DPW and hearing all about the advances in AI and how it can be used to solve business challenges has been great.”

Valdera has built a matching algorithm that uses AI to take specific requests from a buyer and identify all the suppliers in the world that can meet those exact specifications. 

“If you think about the workflow a category manager goes through, there are countless small, repetitive steps that can be digitised with agentic AI,” he says. “That might include comparing spec sheets, processing R&D data, analyzing incoming quotes, or even supporting parts of a negotiation. We see a broader AI layer that can be applied across the supply chain, while these smaller agentic models automate the individual tasks that are often the most manual and time-consuming.”

Future proofing

Looking forward, both companies are positioned in a very strong place to thrive in this digital era. For Toray, the organisation is managing categories in a way previously unprecedented. Toray now has access to the latest developments in the market and it should respond to navigate those changes. “I always say knowledge is power in a negotiation,” explains Eustis. “The more you know about the marketplace, the suppliers, the pricing in every region of the world, then the more prepared you are to go into a negotiation with those suppliers. That’s really made our buyers much more of an expert in their field without extensive amounts of training.”

In Valdera’s case, the next few years are focused on evolution and expansion. Arulmani explains that the goal is to continue transforming the platform by deepening partnerships with companies like Toray and building new features that enable their success in the next generation of procurement. “I truly believe that a year or two from now, technology will look very different,” says Arulmani. “Given the pace at which AI and related capabilities are advancing, the key is to keep evolving the platform and leveraging the underlying data to help organisations like Toray drive growth, strengthen their supply chains, and build long-term resilience.” 

Check out the article in the DPW Amsterdam Takeover Edition here.

Find out more about Valdera here.

Good partnerships don’t just happen.

For a key strategic alliance to work long-term, there must be mutual benefit, trust and both the desire to think differently combined with the willingness to do the hard yards.

Fortunately, Axiom and Roche have found exactly those attributes in one another.

In January 2023, Axiom and global pharmaceutical leader Roche launched OneMarketplace which is a cutting-edge enterprise MarketPlace platform that represented a transformative leap in catalog procurement. The platform not only fully digitises Roche’s global catalog content, but also revolutionises the buying process and experience, delivering real-time savings. Developed through deep collaboration over the previous two years, this groundbreaking procurement technology solution empowers organisations to establish, and seamlessly manage, their MarketPlace for any catalog content and related tail spend. It empowers touchless workflows across all content-based suppliers whilst simply connecting to the organisation’s S2P, ERP or increasingly orchestration layer, and as a result creates a seamless experience for users.

Speaking exclusively to CPOstrategy at DPW Amsterdam 2025 is Alistair Cane, Co-Founder and Director of Axiom since its creation in December 2020. Axiom is a next-generation procuretech innovation which allows enterprise organisations to automate catalog sourcing, free text orders and tail spend, whilst transforming the experience for buyers, suppliers and procurement. Its platform enables procurement to set up, manage and control a closed and automated MarketPlace environment for all content-based categories (both products and services) across the organisation. 

Sitting alongside Cane is Patrick Foelck, Head of Strategy & Solutions Procurement at Roche. Indeed, DPW means a great deal to both organisations as it was actually as a result of a DPW Scout Lab project that the two organisations first started working together in 2021. Roche wanted to completely re-engineer its catalog solution and sought to generate efficiency through automation which subsequently led them to Axiom who were more than able to help. 

The Axiom/Roche factor

“It was interesting because when we first saw the Scout Lab opportunity, we were questioning whether it was right for us at that particular time,” Cane tells us. “We started Axiom to bring a data science based approach to transactional procurement. We looked closely at the opportunity and when we read between the lines, we felt we were actually a very good fit for what Roche was looking for. Then we applied for the competition and went through a detailed process of talking extensively with the Roche team about how we could best meet their needs. This was the start of us shaping the solution jointly. The interesting feedback we were given after we won the remit was that one of the reasons that we were selected was because we listened to the problem and talked about how we could create something bespoke to solve it, rather than simply trying to shoehorn their problem into our platform.”

Foelck agrees with Cane and affirms that Roche didn’t simply need something that would do the job, the company required something ‘revolutionary.’ “The existing technologies and approaches to solve this challenging area weren’t great so we needed something more radical,” adds Foelck. “Axiom’s willingness to co-create and to invest as a small startup into a big corporate’s dream was exceptional. That created a baseline for this marriage and this success of the product and the solution.”

Cane explains that the other piece of the puzzle to get right was to ensure a level of understanding of the audiences that the platform represents. “Quite often when you think about buying channels, you are thinking about connecting buyers with suppliers,” he says. “We took a step back and said, ‘Okay, there are three parties involved in this. What does the buyer need? What do the suppliers need? But most importantly, what does procurement need to drive automation and improvement?’ We then looked at those three perspectives and built something completely unique because there are other solutions that might offer that basic connection between a buyer and supplier, but that often leave procurement in the dark. Being able to drive automation and control from a procurement perspective was really the north star from which we started.”

Whilst Roche was Axiom’s founding client, the platform today is rapidly scaling across many global enterprise organisations, within a variety of industry sectors, and has a global reach across the Americas, EMEA, APAC and beyond. 

Future focused

With the future in mind, the next step for Axiom is one of growth. Cane advises that as of early next year, a new module called MarketPay will be launched that will allow organisations to search across all suppliers on the platform thus making Axiom the vendor of record for those suppliers. “This will be really interesting because they don’t have to onboard to the client’s source-to-pay system,” he tells us. “The buyers can search the content from these suppliers on the platform and buy from them through Axiom. That’s the next iteration.”

Foelck believes there are even greater things in store for not only the future of the partnership but the procurement function itself. “I truly think for procurement to be a valuable and strategic function in the future, it truly needs to reinvent itself,” reveals Foelck. “Are there other things we can do? What problems within the business can we solve? What corporate priorities can we address beyond the pure financial and compliance topics? To invest as a function into the future, we need to be excellent at ‘lowest cost’ for what we do, and that’s where the MarketPlace platform will play the biggest role. We really believe in this product and the roadmap. The more items we are thinking about adding to the platform, the more value we can drive and lower the cost from a processing perspective, whilst enabling us to focus on more strategic activities and reinvest resources. The future is enabled by the platform in many aspects – I think the platform is a foundational piece of our success in the future and sits at the core of our future procurement model.”

Pushing procurement forwards

Cane believes that in the modern procurement world there should be no place for tail spend as it’s defined today. According to Axiom, the mantra is to eliminate unmanaged completely. “It would be very sad if we’re here in a couple of years at DPW still talking about tail spend because tail spend needs to go and it needs to become a strategic managed platform-based channel instead.”

Foelck believes the best sourcing is the sourcing that is avoided but still delivers the outcomes. “Because sourcing to us as a procurement function as well as to the business is time consuming,” he explains. “However, we now have tools to do sourcing differently and still deliver the value, which frees us up to invest elsewhere. We need to think about the problem very differently and that’s where technology and platforms like this come in.”

Cane adds that where companies like Axiom really shine is in the ability to empower procurement to drive value in the C-suite. “Procurement is no longer an entity that’s doing procurement for procurement’s sake – it’s becoming a value tool to the business,” he explains. “There are traditional elements of procurement that now are very easy to automate and allow procurement professionals to be the value business partner that procurement really needs to be. I truly believe technology like ours is a part of driving that transition.” 

Check out the article in the DPW Amsterdam Takeover Edition here.

Find out more about Axiom here.

Resourcly is on a mission to give manufacturers a single source of truth for parts data, using AI to enrich missing data, reduce complexity, optimise spend and improve availability.

Resourcly uses AI-powered data harmonisation and similarity matching to clean up parts master data, eliminate duplicates and turn long-tail spend into measurable value for manufacturers and their partners.

A closer look at Resourcly

Helena Most co-founded Resourcly just over two years ago, and the company has been on an accelerated growth trajectory ever since. Resourcly pioneers deep inventory – uniting human expertise and AI to turn complexity into availability, profitability and smarter resource use for a more sustainable manufacturing future. Its AI-powered shared inventory platform harmonises and enriches inventory data across sites, systems and partners while reducing complexity by eliminating redundancies and identifying reuse opportunities. Resourcly improves working capital and cash flow by turning excess and idle stock into value, strengthens supply chain resilience while dramatically reducing waste and costs.

And Resourcly is currently in the midst of a very exciting time. Recently, Resourcly raised €2.7 million led by Project A to turn hidden inventory and turn long-tail spend into profit. The seed round, led by Project A with support from FIEGE Ventures and XPRESS Ventures and industry leaders Knut Alicke, Philip Harting (CEO, Harting), and Gregor Stühler (CEO, Scoutbee), fuels Resourcly’s European expansion and team growth across all functions after achieving 5x growth in under 12 months. “These are very exciting times as a young, thriving start up,” reveals Most. “For years, I’ve seen manufacturers sitting on billions in idle parts – not because they’re broken, but because they’re buried in fragmented systems. At Resourcly, we’re changing that.

“Our AI-powered platform bridges engineering and purchasing, harmonising complex parts data from data sheets or drawings to uncover duplicates, identify similar or interchangeable components, and recommend qualified alternatives. Our AI-based similarity analysis uncovers patterns that humans and traditional systems can no longer detect. The result is fewer variants, faster sourcing, improved working capital for CFOs, and more resilient supply chains – all without replacing existing systems.”

Key collaboration

Resourcly partners with industry leaders like Sandvik, Kärcher, Schwäbische Werkzeugmaschinen, and Optima – each a market leader in their respective fields. Together, they’re transforming inventory from cost centre to profit driver, delivering measurable financial impact such as working capital optimisation and cost savings and genuine sustainability outcomes.

AI sits at the heart of Resourcly’s capabilities. Speaking at DPW Amsterdam, where digital innovation took centre stage, Most emphasised AI’s transformative role in Resourcly’s operations. She explained how large language models and agentic AI unlock previously inaccessible data insights.

“AI has been critical to our work over the past few years,” Most explains. “We serve some of the world’s largest manufacturers who still process free-text orders. Now we can analyze and identify specific parts, products, or services from unstructured data. We perform similarity analysis on purchased parts using technical sheets and drawings, then run price regression tests – capabilities that were impossible before these technological advances.

“It’s a scalability effect and what we use it for is not just free-text orders, but finding data for lack of master data. Master data harmonisation means that we help manufacturers get information like weights, tariff codes, country of origin information, obsolescence information which was completely manual before, we find technical specifications where we are able to read from technical drawings automatically, and that means we can use all that information for different parts and items and make similarity analysis from that. And then we can compare prices and sustainability measures. It is about essentially giving all the products and parts that I either want to buy or have already in my inventory a data and intelligence layer on top of it and making all this data accessible through a unified interface you can query naturally.”

Agentic AI boom

Most sees agentic AI revolutionising procurement by eliminating traditional workflows and finally giving the function its strategic leverage.

“Manufacturing companies lock in 80% of their costs at the design stage,” she explains. “By the time a bill of materials reaches sourcing, the decisions are already made – procurement can only react, not influence. But when we equip design engineers with intelligent, automated tools, we shift this dynamic entirely.

“This upstream integration reduces costs, eliminates duplicate parts, and streamlines master data management from the start. Agentic AI transforms procurement from a reactive function into a strategic enabler that shapes decisions when they matter most-before they’re set in stone.”

Resourcly builds a data layer on top of existing systems, harmonising inventory data without replacing other systems. Its solution identifies duplicates, compares and flags interchangeable parts, and builds unified data. Beyond cleanup, it creates liquidity by enabling part resale and sharing through trusted networks, turning excess stock into working capital. This way, Resourcly can demonstrate a proven AI use case that improves working capital by up to 15%, reduces cost, boosts part availability for our customers and contributes to greater sustainability in manufacturing.

Apart from digitalisation, another critical CPO priority is driving sustainability through smarter procurement practices – starting with what’s already available. Resourcly’s approach is simple but powerful: buy what’s there first, use similar components, reduce duplicates, and eliminate waste.

Most, passionate about sustainability, explains how Resourcly’s product and material intelligence prevents unnecessary purchases by consolidating comprehensive data for every part and product. “We go far beyond technical specifications,” she reveals. “By integrating compliance, warranty, quality, and sustainability data, we enable teams to identify existing inventory alternatives before ordering new materials. They can analyse critical substances, compare carbon footprints, assess recyclability rates – and most importantly, discover that the part they need might already be sitting in their warehouse or available in a similar component.

Traditional siloed systems with incomplete master data blind companies to these opportunities. Without visibility into existing inventory and component similarities, procurement teams unknowingly purchase additional materials while idle inventory accumulates. Resourcly breaks this cycle by revealing opportunities for common parts usage, alternative sourcing, and inventory pooling – turning potential waste into available resources.

Procurement transformation

Procurement stands at a pivotal crossroads. While digitalisation and automation have advanced, they alone aren’t sufficient. With procurement leaders drowning in digital tools, Most argues it’s time to fundamentally rethink daily operations.

“The question isn’t which tool to add, but where we can eliminate complexity entirely,” she explains. “I work with companies juggling 50 different ERPs – it’s chaos. But here’s what everyone misses: the problem isn’t supply chain visibility. It’s data transparency.

“Most companies fail at the foundation – data quality. You can’t build powerful tools on broken data. That’s why we focus on delivering clean, reliable data first. We establish direct data flows from suppliers to customers, eliminating the endless chase for information.

“When you consolidate all data in one place, ensure its quality, then layer intelligence on top – that’s when everything changes.”

Check out the article in the DPW Amsterdam Takeover Edition here.

Find out more about Resourcly here.

Tail spend is notoriously overlooked.

Today’s Chief Procurement Officer is being pulled in multiple directions. Amidst a challenging geopolitical backdrop, a global digital transformation and ever-increasing ESG requirements, change is demanded and usually quickly. 

Procurement leaders are tasked with spending the majority of their time focusing on strategic spend centred on high value purchases key to a company’s operations. But while this approach is important, to completely disregard tail spend – which often consists of low value but highly frequent purchases that are traditionally regarded as less strategic – is a mistake. 

And it’s a subject that Nick Petheram, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Nomia, is very familiar with.

“I think it’s just a bit hard,” Petheram tells us, in response to why tail spend is such an untapped area of opportunity. “In some of the organisations we talk to, there are perhaps two or three thousand strategic vendors but 25,000 tail vendors so it’s a big mountain to climb. I understand the reasoning that people are focusing on the bits that are a little bit easier because everyone is trying to do more with less now. A lot of people focus on strategic spend and walk straight past some areas of huge compliance risk and great opportunities.”

Nomia: Closer look

Aiming to change that view is Nomia. Petheram’s company is a procurement management firm that empowers organisations to take control of their non-strategic spend. Founded in 2016 under the name of Bell Procurement Management within Bell Integration, Nomia, as it is today known, became an independent company in April 2024.

Nomia’s model blends advanced AI, cognitive search and deep procurement expertise. Backed by its cloud-based platform, Nomia’s experienced teams bring category and geographic insights that help streamline sourcing, optimise supplier relationships and improve contract performance. Nomia works closely with its customers to transform fragmented and often overlooked spend into a strategic advantage. By enhancing visibility, reducing costs, improving compliance and minimising supply chain risk, Nomia helps drive measurable ESG impact and long-term value.

Nomia’s AI procurement platform offers a plethora of benefits to transform operations. These include the likes of autonomous sourcing, supplier recommendations, invoice management, analytics, RFx collaboration and controlled supplier governance. Nomia’s advanced capabilities allow for a personalised experience. Users can engage with the AI assistant, peruse catalogs or request a customised quote.

Nomia’s differentiator

But what truly sets Nomia apart is its ability to go through the entire procurement cycle. According to Petheram, this flexible approach empowers customers to have complete visibility through Nomia via the likes of demand sourcing, contract management, onboarding and onto payments. “There aren’t many options that go through the whole cycle,” reveals Petheram. “Most procurement tools I’ve seen tend to have come about by resolving one of the problems that someone has found or faced during their career. What we are endeavoring to do is give one version of events where all the terms mean the same thing which means there’s a simplicity of engaging end-to-end. I think that’s probably why we’re a little bit different.”

Another of Nomia’s main draws is the way in which it reduces complexity for customers, especially those managing thousands of small suppliers across global operations. And according to Petheram, procurement leaders even often question why they can’t do what Nomia does themselves. “But I always say that you can’t take 20,000 vendors away and give one back who is responsible for all that compliance risk and control,” he says. “What we do is take responsibility for onboarding and contracting with all those vendors. We will take thousands of vendors away from these companies and give them just one back in return. That in itself saves so much because there’s so much effort in accounts payable, accounts receivable and contract management but all of that just gets handed over to us.”

Nomia x Vodafone Procure & Connect

In September 2025, Nomia announced it had started working with Vodafone Procure & Connect to help the organisation manage its tail spend across global operations. As a result of the move, Vodafone is creating a single system of record for non-strategic spend by consolidating fragmented supplier relationships through Nomia’s end-to-end tail spend platform. Through Nomia, Vodafone’s aim was to create greater transparency, stronger governance and improved purchasing power across markets. 

Speaking at the time in a press release announcing the move, Ninian Wilson, Global Supply Chain Director at Vodafone and CEO of Vodafone Procure & Connect, said: “Tail spend can be fragmented and complex to manage. Nomia gives us the confidence that we’re managing it with the right level of oversight, compliance and governance. It’s about applying greater rigour to sometimes overlooked areas of procurement that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.”

“We’ve been providing services to Vodafone for the last 25 years and they face a lot of challenges that large organisations generally have,” explains Petheram. “Why is this important to us? They’ve got 26 operating companies and 57 divisions. What it enables us and Vodafone to do is endeavour to get some of the controls that they’d like to have in some of the areas that they haven’t got time to spend doing it themselves. And the alliance looks after some of their spend in multiple geographies while we’re going out to market to some of their customers to offer a combined Vodafone/Nomia procurement service. This relationship is really important to us.”

AI + HI revolution

Given the challenging global conditions the procurement industry is up against, discovering ways to optimise procurement strategies has never been so critical. As a result, ensuring there is a strategy to accommodate tail spend can be a real differentiator in a flooded market – and this is also where AI can be leveraged to help.

Indeed, AI is changing the world in both a personal and a professional environment. The era of innovation is here and organisations are increasingly seeking to automate in a bid to cut costs and scale efficiency. However, as promising as advanced technologies are, Petheram believes it is still important to retain the human factor, in the form of Human Intelligence (HI), despite the tempting draw of digital tools.

“If you listened to Elon Musk 10 years ago, every one of us would’ve an electric car now,” he tells us. “I think everything takes a little bit longer than you might originally think. At the moment, people are trying on AI and figuring out how it works and how it is embedded into their processes and systems and it will undoubtedly grow and become even more important than it is today. But in our view, you can’t disregard the people angle because it’s really important in terms of ethics and judgement. AI delivers remarkable speed and scale, but it’s human intelligence that gives it depth and direction. The organisations that will lead the next wave of procurement transformation are those that recognise the power of combining data-driven automation with human judgement, ethics, and contextual understanding. 

Pushing the possible

“AI gives you the information so you can make the right decisions – that is why the human factor is key. AI gives us speed and scale – but it’s people who give it purpose. The future belongs to those who blend artificial and human intelligence.”

With an eye on the next few years, Petheram reveals Nomia is growing in North America, Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific, stressing there are no plans to slow down anytime soon. “I think if you speak to most CPOs, the tail market never makes their top five most important things to do. The important thing for us is to continue to try and meet their demands and develop our product in line with that.”

Check out the article in the DPW Amsterdam Takeover Edition here.

Find out more about Nomia here.