Comena

What do they actually do

Comena sells a small, paid AI agent that processes customer orders for distributors and manufacturers. It reads incoming POs, RFQs, and spreadsheets from email, extracts header and line‑item data, matches free‑text product descriptions to the vendor’s SKUs, and pushes the cleaned order into the customer’s ERP or via EDI. Teams can enable an optional one‑click human review before submission (comena.ai, YC launch, demo).

The product is live and being used by paying customers. The team (listed as two founders) reports serving customers in the US and Germany and claims they added six‑figure ARR in a recent month—signals of early paid deployments rather than a prototype (YC company page, job posting).

Who are their target customer(s)

• Inside‑sales / order‑entry clerks at distributors: They re‑key emailed and attached POs/RFQs into the ERP, struggle with messy line items, and risk errors that delay shipments or trigger costly fixes.
• Procurement or quoting teams at manufacturers: They receive large RFQs and Excel lists, need to map free‑text items to catalogs, and are slow to return quotes, which creates backlogs and lost deals.
• Operations / ERP managers: They manage order accuracy and throughput but face constant exceptions from bad data and must staff up during peaks to keep queues under control.
• IT / EDI teams: They maintain brittle, one‑off integrations between varied customer files and ERPs; format changes and free‑text SKUs create ongoing mapping work.
• Sales leaders for inside‑sales teams: Reps spend time fixing and reviewing orders instead of selling, making it hard to raise throughput without adding headcount and slowing order‑to‑cash.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Founder‑led, paid pilots with a Forward Deployed Engineer who ingests the catalog, tunes SKU matching, sets up the one‑click approval flow, and integrates to the ERP/EDI for immediate error‑rate and cycle‑time wins (comena.ai, YC launch, job posting).
• First 50: Turn pilots into case studies and references, run targeted outbound to order‑entry, procurement, and ERP/IT leaders, and sell a standardized onboarding package that reduces FDE time per deployment (demo, comena.ai).
• First 100: Productize connectors (ERP/EDI) and add self‑serve setup for low‑complexity accounts; sign channel partnerships with ERP VARs and EDI/distributor software resellers to sell and implement at scale while reserving FDEs for complex accounts (comena.ai, YC launch).

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Comena targets order‑entry automation for distributors and manufacturers that still process emailed/Excel POs and RFQs, bridging inbox-to-ERP/EDI workflows. This sits between intelligent document processing and order management automation.

Bottom-up calculation:

If there are roughly 20,000 mid‑market distributors and manufacturers in North America and Europe that process significant email‑based orders, and Comena can average ~$20k ACV per account, the initial TAM would be about $400M.

Assumptions:

• Focus on mid‑market distributors/manufacturers that receive many orders via email/Excel (limited existing automation).
• Average ACV of $15k–$30k per account based on order volume and ERP/EDI integration scope.
• Estimate covers NA+Europe initially; global expansion, larger enterprises, and adjacent verticals would increase TAM beyond this figure.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Conexiom: Incumbent in sales order automation for manufacturers/distributors; converts emailed POs into structured ERP orders and is a common baseline alternative.
• Esker (Order Management): Order management automation platform with AI‑driven capture and ERP integrations; widely used in mid‑market and enterprise environments.
• Rossum: Intelligent document processing platform used to extract structured data from POs, invoices, and other documents; often adopted for order‑entry use cases.
• SPS Commerce: Large EDI network and automation provider; competes indirectly where buyers push orders via EDI instead of email attachments.
• Orderful: Modern EDI API and network that simplifies ERP/EDI integrations; overlaps on the integration layer for automated order flows.