Hedosophia leads $7M seed round into retail supply chain AI startup Ameba | TechCrunch

Traditional retailers have a pressing problem. Fast-moving like Shein and Temu are eating their lunch by leveraging purpose-built, end-to-end supply chains. Meanwhile, incumbent retailers are still stuck on legacy platforms, juggling a myriad number of data sets, and struggling to respond to a punishingly fast market.

A London-based startup thinks it has the solution to this problem. Ameba claims to be able to the unstructured data in a retailer’s supply chain systems, sprinkle in some generative AI, and make the whole thing more efficient. 

The startup has now raised a $7.1 million seed round led by London-based VC firm Hedosophia, which has gained a reputation for rarely revealing which companies it invests in. TechCrunch reached out to the latter for further comment, but did not receive a response before publication. 

Ameba’s platform uses generative AI on top of existing supply chain software to give retailers insights into their global supply chains, extracting data from a wide range of sources in order to predict disruptions and react to bottlenecks. The company claims it can reduce manual data input by 30%.

“In supply chains, particularly in the fashion consumer space, a lot of very important data is currently not being captured,” Ameba’s founder, Cedrik Hoffmann, told TechCrunch. “A lot of times, the things that are in the shops are sold at the wrong cost or they’re out of stock, or whatever.”

He said Ameba captures these unstructured data points that cost systems don’t: “We release that information from the information silos, bring them to a central source and surface the insights that are developed from them to the relevant parties within your organization.”

Co-founder Craig Massie said their underlying AI mixes a range of foundational models, including Open AI’s: “It changes depending on the task at hand and what performs best in our benchmarks for that task. The underlying constant across our AI usage is our multi-step agents — they can take actions, explore your ontology and its connections, read your supplier emails, WhatsApps and attachments.”

So far, British interior hardware and lighting company Plank has used Ameba to generate 140 alerts highlighting critical production and delivery delays that would have previously been missed or overlooked.

Before Ameba, Hoffman was the former supply chain director and co-founder of e-commerce company VALOREO, while Massie is a former Palantir engineer.

Also participating in the funding round were Visionaries Club, which previously led Ameba’s pre-seed round, and Anamcara Capital.

Isabella Yamamoto, principal at Visionaries Club, said in a statement, “After speaking to many supply chain owners, we were convinced that Cedrik and Craig had the experience to  build a disruptive business using AI to eliminate fragmentation in supply chains and unlock competitive advantage for brands.”