Traditional retailers have a pressing problem. Fast-moving companies like Shein and Temu are taking advantage of purpose-built end-to-end supply chains. Meanwhile, traditional retailers are still stuck on legacy platforms, juggling large amounts of data sets and struggling to respond to an extremely fast-paced market.
A London-based startup believes it has the solution to this problem. Amoeba claims to be able to take unstructured data into a retailer’s supply chain systems, add some generative AI, and make everything more efficient.
The startup has now raised a $7.1 million seed round led by a London-based venture capital firm. Hedosophywhich has earned a reputation for rarely disclosing which companies it invests in. britcommerce 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 provide retailers with insights into their global supply chains, pulling data from a wide range of sources to predict disruptions and react to bottlenecks. The company claims it can reduce manual data entry by 30%.
“In supply chains, particularly in the fashion consumer space, a lot of very important data is currently not captured,” Ameba founder Cedrik Hoffmann told britcommerce. “A lot of times, things in stores are sold at the wrong price or are out of stock, or whatever.”
He said Amoeba captures these unstructured data points that cost systems don’t: “We liberate that information from information silos, bring it to a central source, and present the insights that are developed from them to the relevant parties within of your organization.”
Co-founder Craig Massie said its underlying AI combines a variety of fundamental models, including open AI: “It changes depending on the task at hand and what works best in our benchmarks for that task. The underlying constant in our use of AI is our multi-step agents: they can take actions, explore your ontology and connections, read your suppliers’ emails, WhatsApps and attachments.”
Until now, the British interior lighting and hardware company Plank has used Ameba to generate 140 alerts highlighting critical delays in production and delivery that would have previously been missed or overlooked.
Prior to Ameba, Hoffman was chief supply chain officer and co-founder of e-commerce company VALOREO, while Massie is a former engineer at Palantir.
They also participated in the financing round Visionaries Clubwho previously led the Amoeba pre-seed round, and Anamcara Capital.
Isabella Yamamoto, director of Visionaries Club, said in a statement: “After speaking with 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. supply and unlock competitive advantages for brands.”