[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Alpas (YC W21) - Software to find supplie...
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Launch HN: Alpas (YC W21) - Software to find suppliers for
industrial parts
Hi HN, we are Nils, Isabel, and Chris - the founders of Alpas
(https://alpas.ai/). We make it fast and easy for medium to large
size manufacturers to find suppliers for industrial parts. Why
does this matter? Buyers at manufacturing companies face high
pressure to cut costs. Supplier sourcing is still very manual and
takes up to 45% of a buyer's time. Due to the lack of research
time, buyers rarely close deals at optimal conditions. Recently,
Covid-19 and material shortages have further accelerated the need
for more transparent supply chains. Isabel came across this
problem during her work as an investment analyst. She realized that
optimizing procurement - the buying of goods and services - is one
of the most important ways for industrial firms to save costs: more
than 50% of revenue is spent on COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) [1] and
sourcing is reported to be the biggest value-driver in procurement
[2]. As an investment analyst she was used to a much higher level
of data transparency that is available from tools such as Bloomberg
or CapitalIQ. Inspired by this, we set out to build a similar
experience for buyers at manufacturers. After talking to lots of
buyers, we found out just how manual current sourcing processes
still are: managing existing suppliers in spreadsheets, web
research to find new suppliers, calling and visiting suppliers on
the ground. Most buyers simply don't have the time to do a thorough
supplier discovery, let alone gather all key information about them
to make informed decisions. Solving this problem requires
gathering and analyzing supplier and supply chain data from many
sources. Building such a tool represents a massive data challenge:
gathering, structuring, and indexing 10B+ parameters of 10M+
suppliers worldwide from 500+ data sources. Our two biggest
technical challenges are a) providing a standardized mapping of the
supplier's product portfolios and b) continuously tapping into new
data sources which need to be incorporated into our existing
pipelines. We use NLP models to extract specific keywords in order
to create a list of potential supplier candidates. We match the
suppliers to various sources using NER, which allows us to filter
down candidates based on specific parameters. The result is a final
supplier list with detailed information on company facts, products,
financials, and much more. Based on this data, we run sourcing
projects with our customers, which means finding suppliers for a
specific product and region. Since our launch in January, we have
been able to win several Fortune 500 companies, including BASF and
ABB, as customers. Using our software, our customers have been able
to reduce time and procurement spend significantly. On a recent
sourcing project, we helped ABB find new suppliers for a custom
lens made out of a special material and even suggested additional
suppliers for a different material with similar properties. For
this project, we saved ABB 40% in procurement spend and 3 weeks of
manual work. Our sales process begins with a demo exploring our
tool with a subset of the customer's existing suppliers. Customers
usually continue with a paid pilot - one sourcing project in a
certain region. In order to access their data going forward and
book more sourcing projects, customers enter into a yearly SaaS
contract. Based on our current pricing, we estimate our addressable
market to be at $15.8 B. You can visit our HN-trial signup page
(https://alpas.ai/hn-trial-signup) to create a 48-hours trial
account for our software with a demo sourcing project. Please note
that we usually do a guided onboarding process with our customers
and thus have not optimized our software to be self-serve. We will
gladly answer your questions and are excited to hear your thoughts,
ideas, and feedback! [1]
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/... and
https://www.readyratios.com/sec/ratio/gross-margin/ [2]
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/...
Author : NilsVollmer
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-06-23 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
| myself248 wrote:
| My kingdom for the Octopart of Grainger/Fastenal/McMaster.
| b20000 wrote:
| you can use alibaba or aliexpress or globalsources? been doing
| that for 16 years now. these days asian suppliers email me to
| pitch their products and services.
| DennisMaHa wrote:
| How is your tool different to scoutbee?
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| So this is basically a US version of Alibaba?
| axelroze wrote:
| I am not a user of Alibaba but from what I see it seems like
| Aliexpress for wholesale. I think that is (1) and (3) from this
| startup's value proposition (Search and Contact). Value (2)
| (Compare/Benchmark) could be the differentiating factor
| depending on how it is implemented.
|
| Also I think these guys will target Europe, specifically the
| DACH region. Not sure how many competitors they have but I am
| 100% sure the clients are many and plenty because SAP and the
| innovation from 90s it brings is considered holy grail of
| modernization in most of German companies.
| NilsVollmer wrote:
| Thank you for your question. No, we provide sourcing
| intelligence based on in-depth supplier and supply chain data.
| We are not a two-sided platform.
| amelius wrote:
| One of many.
| aiisahik wrote:
| Good luck! Tough business to be in.
|
| I was early employee at a b2b marketplace too. I biggest piece of
| advice is to use a SaaS business model first before any attempt
| to use rake model.
| NilsVollmer wrote:
| Thanks for your message and advice!
|
| We actually use a B2B SaaS model and are not a two-sided B2B
| marketplace.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Just storing this here for anyone else unfamiliar: a rake model
| is one where you take a commission of gross sales.
| paulkrush wrote:
| Great work guys! I would love to a see a site like Aliexpress
| with the depth of Alibaba where you use an image of what you're
| looking for to look up parametric models of what you want to buy
| with live pricing and part rendering. I am thinking about the
| humongous world of fasteners and simple parts. Looking at the
| texture of mixed fasteners is like candy awesomeness to me. They
| are so well defined and standard that you can build out one- shot
| models to identify them with the right scanning rig. Sorry the
| future is not flying cars, but awesome part sourcing tools!
| IsabelPoppek wrote:
| Love your enthusiasm for the space! Let's talk about our
| product pipeline in the next 24 months+
| mNovak wrote:
| Sounds excellent! The hardware world is still dirty and manual. I
| feel like an easy step 1 is just to get transparent pricing at
| all--extremely common still to have to call for a quote for some
| niche, but catalog, component.
| IsabelPoppek wrote:
| Thanks so much for your comment. Exactly, this is one of the
| issues we have been seeing: sourcing is extremely manual and
| results are unsatisfactory in many cases. Another issue is
| product-supplier fit: matching the right supplier to specific
| product requirements.
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