The Series A round was led by VC firm Pavestone, with participation from IndiaMART and other investors
Aerchain plans to utilise the fresh capital to enhance the AI capabilities for its platform and for global expansion
The startup’s enterprise procurement platform aids professionals in automating low-level admin tasks to focus on more outcome driven responsibilities
Enterprise AI startup Aerchain
has raised $13 Mn (about ₹118 Cr) in its Series A round led by venture capital firm Pavestone, with participation from IndiaMART and other investors.
The startup provides enterprise procurement solutions through a platform dubbed as the “Spend Operating System”, which turns procurement into a business driver from a reactive cost centre.
Aerchain plans to utilise the fresh capital to enhance the AI capabilities of its platform and for global expansion.
Founded in 2019 by Harsha Kadimisetty and Himavanth Jasti, the Bengaluru-based startup streamlines the procurement process for enterprises. It claims its platform helps procurement professionals spend less time on low-value operational tasks and instead focus on strategy, compliance and cost savings.
“We’re building procurement agents that run 24/7, proactively finding savings, flagging risks, and executing on opportunities before anyone has to ask. This funding accelerates this transformation across enterprises at a much bigger scale,” cofounder and CEO Kadimisetty said.
According to the startup, its agents handle the operational tasks in the background and surface only the decisions that need human judgment. This involves a multi-step process.
How Aerchain Automates Procurement Process
Firstly, its “spend orchestration” layer automates 80% of operational procurement work, reducing task completion time from days to hours. This includes intake routing, policy enforcement, approval workflows, and framework-driven automation across the complete intake-to-pay lifecycle.
For higher-value tasks that require human intervention, including negotiations and technical evaluations, the platform’s agents prepare analysis, benchmarks and negotiation playbooks to drive better and faster outcomes.
Lastly, its “spend intelligence” module continuously analyses spend patterns alongside external market dynamics, including commodity movements, contract expirations, and vendor consolidation opportunities, continually sharing actionable recommendations.
Through this process, AI agents deployed by the Aerchain platform operate across the procurement lifecycle – from conversational intakes, vendor discovery, automated quotation requests, and autonomous negotiation to evaluation, award, invoice management and payment tracking.
Aerchain claims to serve over 50 global enterprise customers across 30 countries, managing $45 Bn in spend. According to the startup, its AI agents reduce the procurement cycle timeline by over half.
It last raised $3 Mn from Season Two Ventures and IndiaMART in its pre-Series A round completed in 2021. It also featured in the April 2022 edition of Inc42’s flagship ‘30 Startups To Watch’.
The development comes amid heightened integration of AI agents across workflows by enterprises looking to automate routine tasks. Agentic AI usage has moved beyond search queries to autonomous task management, with agents increasingly expected to plan, coordinate, and carry out complex workflows across enterprise systems.
As enterprises move from legacy systems and human-centric workflows to automation, startups are working alongside big tech to provide solutions for enterprise use cases. Industry studies currently show that more than 60% of enterprises are exploring AI agents but less than a quarter have scaled them into production workflows.
Startups have more than ample opportunity to scale solutions as agentic AI is expected to make up more than half of the $126 Bn AI opportunity by 2030, as projected by Inc42’s Bharat AI Startups Report, 2026.
In January, AI-powered procurement tech startup 1Buy.AI also secured ₹32.5 Cr ($3.5 Mn) in a seed funding round led by 100 Unicorns.