Press & Media

Open the inbox of any B2B procurement manager and you'll find spreadsheets. Hundreds of them. Each from a different supplier, each in a different format — one labels columns "SKU / Item# / Code," another buries unit cost three columns past the discount tier, a third uses the same header to mean two different things on alternate rows. To buy a single SKU, the buyer downloads five attachments, copies values into their own master sheet, and emails the PO back. Multiply by every category, every brand, every reorder. This is not a small-company workaround. It is how the bulk of B2B distribution — a market measured in trillions — runs in 2026.

It runs that way for a reason that isn't laziness. Every manufacturer has its own catalog format because every manufacturer's data was built for its needs, not the buyer's. No standard ever caught on; there are too many suppliers, each with different SKU schemas, units of measure, packaging, taxonomies, and price-tier logic. Aggregating it into a usable marketplace means parsing, and parsing arbitrary catalogs at scale has, for fifty years, required throwing humans at it.

A long line of B2B marketplaces tried to fix this by moving the work upstream — "fill out our PIM forms and we'll list you." The suppliers didn't. They had no incentive, and their teams were already drowning in Excel. So the marketplaces either stalled at a few thousand neat-but-empty SKUs, or quietly hired parsing teams in the background and called it "supplier success." The bottleneck was never the marketplace UI. The bottleneck was a catalog-translation problem the industry had no tools to solve.

That problem quietly broke around 2023. Once large language models could read a vendor's strange Excel and emit a clean structured row, the labor moat at the bottom of the industry collapsed. Not loudly — quietly. Most people in distribution still don't know it happened.

Catalist is what happens when you build the company on the other side of that collapse. If catalog parsing isn't a human task anymore, neither is supplier onboarding, neither is dispute resolution on a mis-packed pallet, neither is hunting an authorization letter, neither is writing the documentation a buyer needs for compliance. Founder Devin Sardana writes the specs. AI agents handle procurement, onboarding, support, disputes, content, and SEO end-to-end. One operator runs an operation that, in a conventional distributor, would be staffed by dozens.

The numbers, as a result, look unfamiliar for a company this small. 10,000+ businesses on the platform. 2,300+ brand-direct suppliers. New suppliers onboarded in roughly 3 days, where the industry's traditional timeline is 4–6 weeks. 38+ product categories. All run by a single human and a stack of agents.

The interesting thing about Catalist isn't the AI — every company says they use AI. The interesting thing is what the AI lets go. The "complexity" the industry has always pointed to as the reason it couldn't be fixed — fragmented catalogs, brittle integrations, supplier-by-supplier negotiation, documentation no two vendors do alike — was actually a labor moat. Labor moats collapse when the labor stops being necessary. There is a narrow window now where a single AI-native operator can do what required a thousand-person distributor. Catalist is what one founder, building inside that window, looks like.

Devin Sardana is the founder and CEO of Catalist. He founded the company in 2024 to test a thesis: that a B2B marketplace could be built and operated almost entirely by AI agents, with a single human writing specs and reviewing outputs.

Under Devin, Catalist has scaled to 2,300+ brand-direct suppliers and 38+ product categories — with AI agents running procurement, supplier onboarding, dispute resolution, customer support, content production, and SEO end-to-end.

Devin made an unusual bet: that AI agents could run a real company's operations end-to-end — not just answer chat questions. Straight out of Fordham's Gabelli School of Business, he spent fifteen months on Scotiabank's Global Capital Markets desk in New York before walking away to build Catalist. Nearly three years later, the bet is the company: a B2B marketplace where agents handle procurement, supplier onboarding, disputes, customer support, and content production, and a single human writes the specs.