Right place, right time, right product.

This story didn’t begin with a grand vision. It began with frustration.
We had felt it everywhere: inside global companies, across industries, in meeting rooms and online threads. Employees stuck in endless forms. Approval chains stretching for weeks. A thousand e-mails for “just checking in”.

Buying processes in even the most powerful industries and companies felt harder than ordering dinner on your phone. And we kept asking ourselves: Why?

The more we looked at it, the clearer it became. Procurement wasn’t just a workflow problem. It was a language problem.

People think in natural language, their systems think in rigid fields and dropdown menus. So we built askLio around a bold idea: What if employees could simply ask for what they need in their mother tongue, and an intelligent AI system would understand, structure, source, negotiate, and execute?

In 2023, we took that conviction to Y Combinator. Being surrounded by founders who were rethinking entire industries pushed us to go even further. We didn’t want to optimize procurement. We wanted to remove friction entirely. And so we did.

Requests that once took weeks were completed in minutes. Employees stopped rolling their eyes on the procurement process. Strategic buyers stopped drowning in an administrative ocean and finally reclaimed their seat at the strategic table.

What began as frustration became something bigger than we expected. We created a shift in how work feels. So, our story is not one about technology replacing humans. It is about making technology understand what humans need. And it all started with a simple “Why?”.

One for all. All for procurement.