Where Equity Becomes Dollars: Stimulus and the Supplier Diversity Gap

Procurement is where good intentions about diversity either turn into contracts or quietly stall.

Most big companies buy from the same familiar vendors, and smaller or diverse suppliers get overlooked. Tiffanie Stanard built Stimulus to change how companies find, evaluate, and keep their suppliers.

Stanard is based in Philadelphia. Before Stimulus, she founded Prestige Concepts, a brand enhancement agency that ran for more than ten years. She launched Stimulus in 2017 after seeing that relationships with suppliers could be far more valuable than they usually are, and with a goal of leveling the field so more companies get equal business opportunities.

Here's what the platform does:

• Relationship intelligence. It gives companies data and analytics to compare suppliers, collect information, build custom reports, and see results in real time.
• A proprietary score. It helps buyers make better sourcing and purchasing decisions.
• Due diligence. Stanard has described it as a way to check that a material source is a good fit before a company commits.

As TechCrunch reported, the product helps businesses cut costs by avoiding mismatched suppliers while introducing diverse vendors that might otherwise have been overlooked. That mix includes household names and smaller businesses run by underrepresented founders.

The money followed the idea. In August 2022, Stimulus closed an oversubscribed $2.5 million seed round led by Black Ops Ventures, with early investor Darco Capital participating. The company's backers also include Morgan Stanley, Juno Capital, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, REFASHIOND Ventures, and Genius Guild, and it lists Microsoft and Salesforce among key partners. Stanard planned to put the funds toward hiring in sales, data, and engineering.

Three takeaways for the industry:

• Data beats gut. Choosing suppliers by a shared score is harder to bias than choosing by familiarity.
• Relationships have measurable value. Treating vendors as relationships, not line items, changes who gets considered.
• Contracts create jobs. When a small supplier wins a big contract, it needs to hire.

That last point is where Stimulus meets IndeedBlack. Many Black-owned companies sit on the supplier side of the market. A single contract can change how many people they need, and we want those companies to find strong talent when it happens.

Stimulus's site now says a new chapter is coming soon, so keep an eye on getstimulus.ai. Tiffanie Stanard is the founder and CEO.