Soource

The problem

Procurement teams lose weeks on work that could be automated: finding new suppliers, sending requests for quotation, collecting and comparing responses, updating databases. Most of this happens over email, Excel sheets, and tools that do not talk to each other.

Soource was built to bring AI and certified data into a unified flow that dramatically reduces sourcing time, from identifying suppliers to analyzing the offers received.

Our contribution

We worked side by side with the founder and two other developers from their internal team to build the technical foundations of the product and bring it online. We were not the full team, but we contributed to the architectural decisions and some of the more complex parts of the implementation.

Email classification

Every RFX sent to suppliers generates responses with different structures: some reply with an attached Excel table, some with free text in the email body, some with a PDF. The system needed to normalize all of this into a comparable format.

We developed the inbound email classification and parsing layer, which recognizes the type of response, extracts key data (prices, availability, conditions, certifications), and structures it for display in the dashboard. This logic combines natural language processing techniques, rule-based parsing, and LLM integration for ambiguous cases.

Sentiment analysis and availability scoring

Beyond structured data, many responses contain implicit signals: a supplier who replies late with vague language has a different availability profile than one who responds within 24 hours with precise data. We implemented sentiment analysis on responses to provide an additional reliability score for each supplier.

Quote extraction and market price benchmarking

One of Soource's core features is automatic price comparison. The system extracts quotes from responses, normalizes them by unit and quantity, and compares them against the average market prices collected by the platform. This allows procurement teams to immediately understand whether an offer is competitive.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure runs entirely on AWS:

• SES for sending and receiving emails through platform mailboxes
• SQS for the asynchronous analysis job queue
• Lambda for workers that process incoming responses
• DynamoDB for document storage of supplier and RFX data
• Amplify for application deployment

The backend is in NestJS, the frontend in Next.js.

Where it is now

Soource is a live platform that procurement teams use daily for sourcing, benchmarking, and supplier database updates. In January 2025 the company announced a €1.5 million funding round to accelerate growth, covered by Forbes Italy.