{"id":92472,"title":"Comena — AI agents that automate order processing for distributors and manufacturers","tagline":"Automated order entry - from inbox to ERP","body":"👋 Hello!\n\nWe’re Jiehua and Almo, co-founders of **Comena**. We've been building things together since middle school and this time, we’re automating one of the most painful processes in B2B supply chains.\n\n---\n\n### 🧠 TL;DR\n\n\\*\\*Comena automates order entry from inbox to ERP for distributors and manufacturers.\\*\\*\\\nNo more manual data entry. No more wasted time. Our AI reads purchase orders from emails or PDFs, extracts key info, matches products to SKUs, and sends the order to your ERP — with (or even without) human-in-the-loop review.\\\n**Sales teams save 75-99% of time spent on order processing.**\n\n---\n\n### 😩 The Problem\n\nIn industrial supply chains (fasteners, parts, MRO, etc.), every order and inquiry is still typed manually into an ERP.\n\nHere’s how it looks today:\n\n1. A distributor or manufacturer receives a PO via email\n2. A sales rep opens a PDF attachment\n3. They manually type the content of the e-mail/PDF into the ERP\n4. Then it goes to fulfillment\n\nThis process is repeated **every single day** and eats up to **50% of inside sales teams’ time** — time that could be spent on proactive selling and customer relationships.\n\n---\n\n### ⚙️ Our Solution\n\nhttps://youtu.be/yoii7pgK1GY\n\nWe built an AI-powered order processing agent that automates this end-to-end:\n\n✅ Forward any PO or RFQ to Comena\\\n✅ Our AI extracts header data, product descriptions, quantities, pricing, etc.\\\n✅ Matches the items to your product number (even from messy free-text)\\\n✅ Sales rep quickly reviews the output\\\n✅ Sends it to the ERP with 1 click\n\nWe support PDFs, Excel sheets, RFQs, email bodies — and integrate seamlessly with ERPs. If your ERP supports EDI, even better: Comena plugs right in.\n\n---\n\n---\n\n### 👬 About Us\n\nWe’ve been friends for over 10 years — building robots together and winning awards at robotics world championships when we were younger.\n\n* **Jiehua (CEO)** was the youngest software engineer at Google Switzerland, a PM at Pina Earth (YC W22), and first hire at procurement startup askLio (YC S23).\n* **Almo (CTO)** was the first hire at Leaping AI (YC W25), and worked at Amazon AWS, HubSpot, and Microsoft, integrating OpenAI into Azure.\n\n---\n\n### 🙏 Our Ask\n\nIf you know anyone who fits the below, we’d **love an intro**:\\\n• Distributors or manufacturers processing lots of POs\\\n• Companies in industrial, MRO, or parts supply\\\n• Sales or ops leaders frustrated by manual order workflows\n\nOr just reach out if you’re curious — we’d love to show you the product.\n\n📧 [jiehua.wu@comena.ai](mailto:jiehua@comena.ai)\\\n💻 [https://www.comena.ai](https://comena.ai)\n\nLet’s automate manual order entry together!\\\n– Jiehua \u0026 Almo\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=92472\u0026key=user_uploads/1188611/8acc3123-8a3a-4461-aec2-6a0acffeebf4)\n\n","slug":"O3U-comena-ai-agents-that-automate-order-processing-for-distributors-and-manufacturers","created_at":"2025-07-28T15:29:49.123Z","updated_at":"2026-07-22T12:31:56.752Z","total_vote_count":23,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/O3U-comena-ai-agents-that-automate-order-processing-for-distributors-and-manufacturers","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=92472\u0026key=user_uploads/1188611/8acc3123-8a3a-4461-aec2-6a0acffeebf4","company":{"id":30698,"name":"Comena","slug":"comena","url":"https://comena.ai","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/0cd3632057a23091b73c4c26a68f56e59b7f0ba4.png","batch":"Summer 2025","industry":"B2B","tags":[],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/30698"}}