Every day, procurement teams worldwide waste hours manually reviewing vendor proposals, a tedious and error-prone process. For Malaysian enterprises, this inefficiency means delays, ballooning costs, and lost opportunities. But what if Artificial Intelligence (AI) could change that?
Laminar, a Malaysian AI startup pioneering Autonomous Intelligent Agents to automate the Request for Proposal (RFP) process, helping companies instantly evaluate vendors and make smarter procurement decisions.
Today, 1337 Ventures announces its investment in Laminar, reinforcing Malaysia’s position as an emerging leader in AI-driven enterprise solutions. For large enterprises, procurement teams spend 25–30 hours per vendor manually reviewing thick tender documents. The result? Delays in critical business decisions, human errors that lead to costly mistakes, and escalating costs from hiring more staff to keep up.
“Procurement is one of the most overlooked bottlenecks in business. Hiring more people to sift through vendor proposals is not the solution—AI is,” said Bikesh Lakhmichand, CEO and Founding Partner of 1337 Ventures.
Rather than drowning in PDFs and spreadsheets, procurement teams using Laminar can define selection criteria in a simple interface, upload vendor proposals, and receive instant AI-powered assessments on vendor suitability. By eliminating the manual review process, Laminar cuts down procurement time from days to seconds, allowing businesses to make faster, data-driven decisions.
Malaysia is not traditionally known for AI startups, but Laminar is proving that local innovation can compete on the global stage. “The RFP process has long been manual, slow, and prone to oversight — but recent breakthroughs in AI language models now allow us to analyze complex documents with human-like understanding and scale with machine-level efficiency,” said Joshua Teh, Founder and CEO of Laminar.
1337 Ventures’ investment in Laminar comes through 1337 Capital 1, a sector-agnostic seed fund backed by industry veterans like Suresh Thiru, former COO of JobStreet. The fund aims to accelerate AI-driven enterprise solutions and position Malaysian startups on the global map. “This isn’t just an investment in Laminar—it’s an investment in Malaysia’s AI future,” Bikesh added.
As part of its continued dedication to fostering innovative founders, 1337 Ventures is actively seeking startups to support through the 1337 Capital 1. Startups seeking venture capital funding and strategic guidance are encouraged to secure a spot at 1337 Ventures’ flagship Pitch Tuesday session by visiting https://1337.ventures/pitch-tuesday
