PANews reported on March 5th that Lio, an AI-powered procurement agency startup, announced the completion of a $30 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Lio aims to build virtual procurement teams for large enterprises, taking over the entire process from request submission, price comparison, supplier negotiation, supplier onboarding, to order placement in ERP, email, and contract systems through natural language requests. a16z stated that current procurement processes in large global enterprises still heavily rely on email, PDFs, and human collaboration, with procurement transaction volume linearly linked to manpower size, resulting in annual expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars on procurement personnel. Lio seeks to break this linear relationship through a scalable AI agent, automating traditional back-office procurement work.