Spend Matters Future 5 2023 – Introducing Mithra-Ai

The procurement technology market is evolving rapidly and deploying the latest power that innovation can bring to support the changing and challenging needs of its customers. In an ever-crowded space it’s hard for those who rely on these platforms and systems to keep ahead of the latest developments.

For that reason, Spend Matters analysts make it their mission to scour the market to find those new solution providers that can fulfil a very specialist role to fulfill the procurement needs of today. Following months of debate based on extensive knowledge of the many procurement technologies they have reviewed, analysed and benchmarked, they arrive at a list of five young providers that they believe are innovative and exciting, have a rapidly rising presence in the market, can grow sustainably and which every CPO should have on their radar.

These start-ups are taking technology further to address problems not previously solved, or are introducing a new category of automation that tackles new challenges in interesting ways. We believe these companies deserve greater visibility, especially in a market which is increasingly consolidating and diluting buyer choices.

Get to know all the providers that made this year’s 50 To Know, 50 To Watch and Future 5 lists here.

See the Lists

So we are delighted to introduce you to our Future 5 as we capture their voices. Today please get to know Mithra-Ai.

What is Mithra

Mithra-ai is a Saas solution that aims to bridge the gap between data harmonization and category analytics. The mission is to apply the power of AI and machine learning to both reduce cognitive load for category owners but at the same time have them working with relevant insights. While Mithra’s AI works in the background to complete complex data analysis, the user-facing aspect of the product is simple and easy to understand. You can read a in-depth description of Mithra here as part of Spend Matters Insider

How Mithra came into being

Rasa Raoufi, one of Mithra’s co-founders, worked for a decade in procurement and supply chain design. “During my time,” he explains, “I recognized the impact quality insights can have for the category owners and procurement as a whole. But the preparation of data that gaining such insights needs is difficult and, frankly, tedious. Simply put, taxonomy creation is not desired by anyone.”

Given these pains, one would think tools would be at hand. But there was a market gap. So, Rasa gathered good connections he made in product development, software development and SaaS to create a solution to address this market gap that caused them so many headaches.

What are Mithra’s greatest strengths?

As taxonomy maintenance and spend data harmonization are foundational and dull tasks for human beings, Mithra has turned itself towards presenting the insights this task would create in a manner accessible to companies of all sizes. “We’re still the only procure-tech company that uses the procurement taxonomy as a backbone,” Rasa says. “Procurement taxonomy is the DNA of any procurement organization. We put it at the center of our tool, and it serves as the backbone for all our offerings.” By focusing on the taxonomy, spend data harmonization and, by extension, the impact it has on category insights, Mithra can target multiple pain points simultaneously.

What’s the road ahead for Mithra-Ai?

Going forwards, Mithra has two main goals. “First,” Rasa states, “we want to use GenAI to focus above and beyond any one company. Basically, we want to use taxonomies and machine learning to generate a unified language for an industry or categories that spread across multiple different companies. Second, we want to continue to reduce the amount of time category owners are spending on transactional activities. Many category owners are spending 60% to 70% of their time conducting these activities. Currently, we significantly lower this percentage, but our goals is to reduce this percentage to as close to zero as possible, so that procurement teams can instead spend their time simulating different category strategies and realize their strategic goals.”

What does it mean to be a Future 5?

“Obviously, it’s an honor to be selected as part of the Future 5. Our only mission since day one has been to make the best-in-class category management accessible to all of the industries with all their complexities and to make category owners the heroes and go-to people. Moving forward, we will challenge ourselves to push our own boundaries and hopefully move into the 50 to Watch and then 50 to Know lists as well.”

Many thanks to Mithra for sharing its story with us. We hope the Future 5 broadens our readers’ perception of the art of the possible to help you position your organization for the challenges ahead.

Reach out if you like to know more about becoming a Future 5.

To learn more about the methodology behind our analysts’ decisions, listen to our webinar that was hosted by the Spend Matters team.