Speya is your AI assistant for sourcing. You tell it what you need in plain language and it does the work for you, calling the right tool for the job: finding suppliers (Discovery), researching them (Enrich), emailing them (Engage), and tracking changes over time (Monitor).

This guide covers Supplier Discovery, which finds verified suppliers across 250+ data sources, including trade fairs, marketplaces, certification databases, import/export records, company registers, and the open web. Use it whenever you want to explore a market, find alternatives to a current supplier, or qualify new partners.

When you start a search, you choose how Speya works with you. This guide covers working step by step, where Speya pauses after each step so you direct the search yourself. There is also Speya Auto, where Speya scopes and runs the whole sourcing case on its own and returns a tiered shortlist, see How to run a sourcing case with Speya Auto.

In this article

1. Click “+ New list” to begin. Find it in your workspace, or open the Source & Enrich view.

2. Type to Speya what you’re looking for. Write it the way you’d brief a colleague, and include:

You can also attach a drawing, PDF, spec sheet, or photo, or paste a website URL or a part identifier. The more context you give, the better the results.

3. Read the Discovery Plan, and edit it if you like. The plan has two parts: what Speya will search for, and the requirements it will check each supplier against. When Speya can verify a requirement from a source, that supplier shows up in your list as a match. Remove or reword anything before you run it.

4. Click “Start search” and watch the results appear. Suppliers fill the list as Speya verifies them. A search at scope 100 usually takes a few minutes; niche or specialised categories take longer.

5. Read your results.

6. Type to Speya to refine the results. Speya does what you tell it, so if the list isn’t right, say what’s off. Usually one of two things has happened: it locked onto something close to, but not quite, what you meant, or it missed suppliers that are out there. Steer it:

To find more or different suppliers, ask Speya to update the search. To re-check the suppliers you already have against a new requirement, ask for that instead.

Speya remembers the conversation. Everything in the chat stays in context for that list: your earlier questions, your corrections, the research already run, and the reasoning behind the suppliers it found. The more it knows about your project, the better it refines. So keep talking to it rather than starting over.

7. Type to Speya to rank the suppliers into tiers. When the list is worth comparing, ask Speya to sort it for you instead of reading every row yourself. It reasons across every requirement and result on the list and ranks the suppliers into tiers from 1 to 3, with the reasoning behind each one. For example: “As a [role] sourcing [product], rank these suppliers into tiers.” Click a supplier’s tier to read why it landed there. Tiers aren’t fixed: they update as you add research or ask Speya to re-tier on your own criteria.

A supplier search is never a complete map of the market, and it doesn’t need to be. What you’re aiming for is a list that looks like the market itself: a mix of the obvious leaders and smaller, credible players, with your requirements evaluated across them and the clear non-fits removed. You’re there when most of these are true:

When that’s true, you’ve found your suppliers. The next step is to research them in depth, adding the columns that let you compare them properly. With that research in place, you can also ask Speya to shortlist across the whole list, for example “as a [role] sourcing [product], give me the top-tier suppliers with reasoning,” because a good shortlist needs the data behind it.

Next: Adding research columns to your supplier list with Enrich. (How to research suppliers with Enrich)

Start broad, narrow it later.

Don’t upload detailed drawings on the first pass. A drawing makes Speya hunt for exact geometry, which narrows discovery too hard. Use a written specification to find suppliers, and save the drawings for evaluating them later.

Talk to Speya. Give it the thinking behind the search, not just keywords. Speya researches the product or service first to understand the domain before it explores the market, so the more you share about your goal, your constraints, and what you’re unsure about, the better it frames the search.

When one requirement is rare, build the search around it. If the product itself is common but a single requirement is scarce (a specific certificate, accreditation, or regulated status), lead the discovery plan with that scarce requirement and check the common one as a column instead. It points Speya down the narrow road that actually matters. This is mainly useful for regulated or heavily certified categories.

Leave a standard certification out of the search. When a certification is common in the category but suppliers publish it inconsistently, putting it in the plan narrows the search and leaves out capable suppliers that simply don’t state it online. Check it as a research column afterwards, so a supplier that doesn’t publish it gets evaluated rather than missed.

Search more than once for hard-to-map markets. Start broad, then ask Speya to simplify or refocus the discovery plan and run it again. Each pass adds to the same list, so coverage builds up.

Name the suppliers you expected to see. If a major player didn’t appear, tell Speya: “You missed A, B and C. Include them and similar companies.” Speya studies the named suppliers’ public information, works out why they were missed, and uses that to refine the search plan and steer new discoveries toward similar companies.

Cancelling the search doesn’t reset your list. Stopping a search keeps the results you have. Each new search adds to the list by exploring new requirements and keeps all your existing columns. The list grows, and with each pass it becomes better informed.

Keep working in the same list. To adjust or widen a search, keep working in the same list rather than starting a new one. Your suppliers and all your research columns carry over, so you never redo work when you refine.

Every prompt here is something you type to Speya. They’re grouped by where you are in a search, with a description of what each does.

Describe your case to Speya

Check the plan before running

Refine and widen (changes the pool)

Re-check the suppliers you already have (no new discovery)

Read the list

Rank and shortlist

Prune the list

Why didn’t the biggest suppliers in my market show up?
Usually it’s the search, not a coverage gap. Rule these out first: asking for “alternatives to X” excludes X by design; searching for distributors won’t surface manufacturers, or the reverse; and a search you cancelled early evaluates fewer candidates. If none of those apply, it can be genuine coverage: the requirements were stacked too tightly, the large supplier does so many things that yours was hard to confirm, or it has little online presence (common for some Chinese suppliers, since much of China’s web isn’t indexed by Google). Either way, tell Speya which companies you expected and it will look into why they were left out.

Where does Speya find suppliers?
Across hundreds of specialised sources, not a single web index. Speya reads how suppliers describe themselves across trade fairs, certification databases, trade records, company registers, and the open web, in many languages and in whatever detail each one publishes. That’s what lets it find suppliers worldwide across almost any category, rather than working from one standardised list. It also means a strong supplier with a thin website simply has less for Speya to find, which is often why something shows as “No match.” It works the other way too: because Speya doesn’t reward the best-marketed companies, it can surface small or lesser-known suppliers that a normal web search would bury, as long as they leave a trace in one of its sources.

What if a supplier I know is missing?
Add it by name, or paste its website if the name doesn’t resolve. Speya researches it against your requirements and can tell you why it didn’t appear, which also helps it find similar suppliers.

Can I write to Speya in another language?
Yes. Swedish, Polish, French, English and others all work, and typos are fine. Speya reads foreign-language supplier sites for you, so your results aren’t limited to the language you searched in. Its replies and the sourced information come back in English.

Why does a supplier’s location show as “Unknown”?
It usually means the location simply wasn’t confirmed from the sources checked, not that it’s truly unknown. Ask Speya to add a research column that finds it, or click the cell and select the country manually.

Why do two similar searches give me different suppliers?
That’s by design. Each search explores part of the market, so running it again with different wording surfaces suppliers the first pass didn’t. For the fullest picture, run a few passes (start broad, refine, then simplify) rather than re-running the same search.

Will one search find every supplier in my market?
No, and it isn’t meant to. One search finds the strongest matches within your scope, based on what suppliers publish, and there’s far more out there than any single run can read in the time it takes. So a search covers a portion of the market thoroughly rather than skimming everything, which is why running a few passes with different wording builds fuller coverage.

My search seems stuck, should I wait or cancel?
Usually neither. Reload the page first; results have often already come in and the page just hasn’t caught up. The search also keeps running in the background, so you can leave and come back. Only if the plan itself looks too narrow should you cancel and ask Speya to widen it, which is faster than waiting.

Can I run more than one search at once?
Yes. Open Speya in a second browser tab and start a search for another project there. Both keep running in parallel, so you can work on several cases at the same time.

How many suppliers can a list hold?
An imported list can hold thousands of suppliers. A step-by-step search has a built-in scope of up to 100 suppliers per run, and you build past that by running more passes on the same list. Speya Auto can gather more still, because it keeps searching on its own. How many you reach also depends on the complexity of your query.

Which browser should I use?
Speya works best in Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari, and usually runs fine in other browsers too.

Why does a supplier I know fits show up as “No match”?
Because Speya couldn’t verify it from a trustworthy source, not because the supplier fails. The supplier may simply not state the capability online. Tell Speya, for example “I know these companies offer this, can you reason about which ones likely do?”, and it can re-evaluate using softer criteria. You can also confirm it directly with the supplier by email: once they reply, the answer is verified and the cell turns from no match to match.

Can I search using a drawing, photo, PDF, or part number?
Yes. Drop the file into the chat, or paste a URL or an identifier like a CAS number, and add any context. Speya reads specifications, dimensions and images to build a more accurate search, which is the best approach when a part has no clean name.

What’s the difference between this and ChatGPT or Google?
Speya is purpose-built for sourcing, which is what sets it apart from general tools like ChatGPT or Google. It pairs sourcing-specific databases with agents built to find and validate suppliers, so it reaches far more relevant data, checks it as it goes, and backs every match with a source link. You get a list of real, traceable suppliers in a workspace built to navigate and act on them. We run no advertising or paid placement, so results are ranked on relevance, not on who paid to appear. And if Speya can’t confirm something, it says so instead of guessing.

Can I save a search and re-run it later?
Yes. Lists are saved automatically. You can also set up Monitoring to re-run a search on a schedule and surface new suppliers as they appear.