Vendra - AI vendor and project management for hardware teams

TL;DR

• Hardware engineers should spend their time building cool products, but they actually spend their time dealing with vendors and doing non-engineering work (digging through emails, searching for files, updating spreadsheets, etc.)
• Traditional project management solutions don’t really work in hardware, and vendor communications inevitably revert to emails/text messages/WeChat/etc.
• Vendra uses AI to understand these vendor communications, giving hardware teams modern project management and instant information lookup with almost no change to their existing workflow
• We offer solutions to hardware teams at all stages - book a demo today!

The Team

We’re Shan and Anish! We’ve known each other since childhood when our parents moved from India to the same apartment complex in Santa Clara. Between us, we’ve built a lot of cool hardware (cameras for autonomous drones, AR/MR headsets) and cool software (ML for satellites, AI for the shipping industry).

The Problem

As a former hardware engineer, Shan experienced the challenges of managing complex projects across a network of vendors, suppliers, and manufacturers. He saw hardware teams struggle to use traditional project management solutions with vendors because of the unstructured nature of projects and communications, security and access issues, and difficulties in the adoption of new processes. The workflow inevitably defaulted to emails, text messages, WeChat, etc., often leading to misplacement of crucial information.

A 2021 report revealed that 70% of engineers still use email for external collaboration, struggling to track critical information across teams. 94% of engineers want faster access to data, and 29% often work with outdated information, leading to costly delays, reworks, and longer time to market.

We’re building Vendra to change that.

The Solution

Vendra uses AI to bring a smart project management suite and file repository to hardware teams working with vendors and suppliers - all with no change to existing workflows.

Simply connect Vendra to your email/WeChat/WhatsApp/Slack (or cc it to your conversations and threads):

Vendra automatically contextualizes your emails/messages/files and generates key takeaways like project and conversation summaries, open items, blockers, tasks, etc. It also creates a smart file directory so you never have to go digging through emails or attachments ever again.

Easily access all this information from anywhere through our SlackBot, GPT-like chat interface, or web-based dashboard:

You can ask Vendra AI things like

• ‘Show me all the quotes and lead times we got from vendors for the upper bracket machining in the past month’
• ‘What are all the open items for the enclosure injection molding tooling?’
• ‘Pull up the RF module datasheet the supplier sent me last week’
• And so much more!

For teams looking for 2-way external collaboration, we also offer VendraPM - a secure end-to-end platform to onboard your vendors and work together across projects and tasks. Features like secure file sharing, document revision control, and AI-enabled language translation make external work easier than ever:

The Ask

• If you work in hardware, book a demo today!
• We also love warm intros to folks in hardware - if you know anyone working in (or around) hardware, we’d love to chat with them to understand their workflow and see how we can help!
• Follow us on LinkedIn and X!