ProcureAI

Buy from any vendor, safely, with one sentence. The AI chooses; Kora makes the choice safe.

Try it live → procureai-six.vercel.app/buy (runs on Kora's sandbox, so every naira is test money)

"300 branded T-shirts, under ₦1.5m, delivered by 23 October."

That one sentence is the whole interface. ProcureAI searches its vendor market for the suppliers that sell what was asked, reads their messy replies into one comparable table, checks every vendor with Kora, recommends one, takes the payment, holds the money, and pays the vendor only as the goods arrive. It ends in a record anyone can verify.

The problem

Buying from a vendor you don't know yet in Nigeria runs on WhatsApp voice notes, "send half now", and trust. A buyer compares prices that arrive in different shapes, pays a stranger up front, and has no proof afterwards. The cheapest quote is often the one that isn't real.

What happens

	Step	What the buyer sees
1	Ask	One sentence. ProcureAI shortlists up to eight vendors that sell that item and asks them all. They reply in their own words, at their own pace (some decline, some never answer); ProcureAI turns "boss good evening, 300 pcs i go do am 3900 per one" into a clean row. Totals are computed in code, never by the model.
2	Check	Kora confirms each vendor is a registered business and that the payout account belongs to that business or one of its directors. A vendor that fails is struck through with Kora's reason, and cannot be approved or paid.
3	Approve	One click. Kora opens a one-time bank account for this purchase only.
4	Pay	The buyer transfers from any bank app. ProcureAI re-asks Kora how much actually arrived before crediting a single kobo. Kora caps one account at ₦1,000,000, so a ₦1.26m order is paid as two honest transfers.
5	Hold	The money sits held. 30% goes to the vendor now, so they can start work.
6	Deliver	The buyer gets a 6-digit code. The vendor types it on delivery and the remaining 70% is released. If the buyer never hands it over, the vendor proves delivery with a photo, and the 70% is released after 72 hours unless the buyer reports a problem.
7	Record	A shareable page lists every naira in and out with its Kora reference, and ends on Left unaccounted: ₦0. It saves as an image.

Along the way, buyer and vendor can message each other on the order. If something goes wrong, the buyer presses Something's wrong: payouts freeze, both sides add a note and a photo, and ProcureAI either pays the vendor or refunds what is still held through Kora. Vendors register once (/vendors/join), after which a quote is one message; a vendor who hasn't registered can still reply through a one-off link.

Why Kora is the product, not a plug-in

Take Kora out and ProcureAI stops existing: Kora gates the recommendation (identity), holds the money (one-time bank-transfer accounts) and releases it (payouts). Every state change is confirmed against Kora twice, by signed webhook and by asking Kora directly.

Kora capability	Used for
CAC business verification	Is this vendor a real, active registered company?
Bank account verification	Does the payout account belong to the company or a director? (name matching rule below)
Bank-transfer charges + charge query	The one-time pay-in account, and the truth about what was paid
Payouts + payout query	Stage 1 (30%) and Stage 2 (70%) to the vendor, each with its own reference
Balances and balance history	Pre-flight funds check, and a reconciliation screen that matches Kora's ledger to ours
Webhooks	Signed events, verified over the raw bytes, stored first, processed after
Refunds + refund query	Disputes ruled for the buyer: what is still held goes back through Kora

Built to be trusted with money

• Rules live in the database, not just the code. Eight invariants are enforced by Postgres triggers and constraints: an order can't be paid without a verified vendor, the ledger can't go out of balance, a payout can't exceed what is held. Tests attack each one by writing straight to the tables to try to break it.
• Truthful amounts. The buyer is credited only from Kora's re-queried figure, never from a webhook body.
• Money is exact. Integer kobo end to end; there is no floating-point money anywhere on the server.
• Safe when things go wrong. Duplicate, out-of-order, forged and missing webhooks; Kora timeouts; unknown payout outcomes; double-clicks and races. Each has a defined behaviour and a test, and all of them can be triggered on demand from the admin page.
• The AI is fenced. A model reads messy text, but every number it returns must appear in the vendor's message, the ranker never sees vendor free text, and a deterministic parser takes over if the model is down.
• Nothing is silently simulated. Any simulated path shows a visible badge.

286 automated tests (unit, integration against a real Postgres, and Playwright end to end), plus a suite that runs the full purchase against the real Kora sandbox.

See it in 90 seconds

1. Open /buy, type anything you'd buy, press Continue, then Ask vendors. Replies arrive one by one.
2. Check vendors with Kora. One is struck through. The cheapest vendor isn't a registered business.
3. Approve, then use the sandbox strip to make the transfer(s).
4. Open tracker, then Open vendor's phone, and type the buyer's 6-digit code.
5. Open record. Every reference, and ₦0 unaccounted.

The click-by-click script, with every failure state you can trigger on demand, is in docs/DEMO.md.

How it's built

Next.js (App Router, TypeScript strict) · Postgres + Prisma · Zod on every boundary · server-sent events for live screens · deployed on Vercel. One module, lib/kora/, is the only code that talks to Kora. docs/ARCHITECTURE.md covers the state machine, the webhook path and the concurrency rules.

Run it yourself

Needs Node 20+ and Docker. No keys required: the offline mode replays Kora's documented responses and shows a red OFFLINE banner on every page.

npm install
npm run db:up                         # Postgres in Docker
npx prisma migrate deploy
npm run dev:offline                   # http://localhost:3000/demo
npm test                              # unit + integration tests