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In 1751, a French philosopher named Denis Diderot set out to do something radical: organize all of human knowledge and make it accessible to everyone.
The result was the Encyclopédie - 28 volumes, 72,000 articles, 3,000 illustrations, and one of the most ambitious intellectual projects in history. It's also the inspiration behind our company's name.
Here's why.
Diderot's most controversial belief wasn't about philosophy or politics. It was about who actually held valuable knowledge.
In 18th-century France, the intellectual establishment - the academics, the clergy, the aristocracy - assumed that the knowledge worth preserving lived in universities and royal courts. Diderot thought that was nonsense. He argued that the knowledge of a dyer, a glassblower, or a farmer was every bit as valuable as that of a mathematician or theologian. He didn't just write about it - he sent researchers into workshops and factories to document how tradespeople actually worked. The Encyclopédie included hundreds of detailed plates showing the machinery, tools, and techniques of artisans, elevated to the same status as entries on philosophy and natural science.
This is the same bet we're making at Didero.
The most valuable procurement data doesn't live in neatly structured ERP fields. It lives in email threads, PDF attachments, supplier conversations, and the tribal knowledge that one person on your team carries in their head. For decades, that information was effectively invisible to software - too messy, too unstructured, too human. Generative AI changes that. It's the technology that finally makes unstructured data usable at scale, the same way the printing press made craft knowledge transmissible for the first time.
Before the Encyclopédie, human knowledge was scattered, fragmented, and inaccessible. Craft techniques were trapped in individual workshops. Scientific discoveries were siloed by discipline and language. There was no system for making any of it portable or searchable.
Diderot built that system.
If you work in procurement at a mid-market manufacturer or distributor, this should sound familiar. Your purchase orders are in one system, your supplier communications in another, your contracts in a shared drive somewhere, your institutional knowledge in a Teams chat - or worse, in someone's head. The information exists. It's just scattered across a dozen tools and formats with no connective tissue.
That's the problem we're solving. Didero takes chaotic, manual, distributed procurement workflows and makes them structured, automated, and legible.
Diderot wasn't just an organizer. He was an outsider who took on the most powerful institutions of his era. The Encyclopédie was banned, censored, and condemned by both the French government and the Catholic Church. They understood, correctly, that democratizing knowledge was a threat to the existing power structure.
We're not getting banned by the Vatican (yet), but there's a parallel. The procurement software market has been dominated for decades by legacy platforms built in an era when "automation" meant digitizing a paper form. We believe that era is ending. AI-native procurement isn't a better version of the old thing - it's a fundamentally different approach. And building it means challenging incumbents who have spent years constructing moats around complexity rather than solving for it.
One of the Encyclopédie's most lasting contributions was making craft knowledge portable. Before Diderot, if you wanted to learn glassblowing, you apprenticed with a master for years. The knowledge couldn't travel. Afterward, it could - not perfectly, but the barrier dropped from "find a master and dedicate a decade" to "read the entry and study the plates."
This maps directly to one of the hardest problems in procurement. When your best buyer retires or your AP specialist leaves, their knowledge walks out the door - the supplier relationships, the approval logic, the workarounds, the exception handling. None of it was ever written down because there was never a system that could capture it.
Didero is that system. We make an organization's procurement intelligence persistent and transferable, so it survives any single person's departure.
Diderot had the vision decades before he had the means to execute it. The Encyclopédie only became feasible because of a specific convergence of technologies - the printing press, copperplate engraving for technical illustrations, and a distribution network that could deliver volumes to subscribers across Europe.
Our story is similar. The idea that software should understand an invoice in an email, parse a supplier's lead time update from a PDF, or extract pricing from an unstructured quote - none of that is new. Procurement teams have wanted this for years. What's new is that generative AI finally makes it possible. The vision predated the technology. Now the technology has caught up.
Denis Diderot believed that the world's most important knowledge was hiding in plain sight - in the hands of the people who actually did the work. He built a system to surface it, organize it, and make it useful.
That's what we're building too. Just for procurement.
As for why it's Didero and not Diderot - our Belgian co-founder Tom Petit would have happily kept the original spelling, pronounced perfectly, as any self-respecting European would. But his American co-founder Tim Spencer couldn't reliably pronounce it, and insisted that if he couldn't get it right, neither would our customers. The "t" was sacrificed at the altar of American phonetics. Tom's forgiveness remains pending.
