Traditional retailers face challenges from fast-moving competitors, and Ameba’s AI technology offers solutions to modernize outdated systems as it secures a $7M seed round led by Hedosophia
A new company in London thinks it knows how to fix this issue. The company Ameba says it can take the unstructured data in a store’s supply chain systems, add creative AI, and improve the whole thing.
The company has now raised $7.1 million in a seed round led by the London-based venture capital firm Hedosophia. This firm is known for keeping its investments secret. TechCrunch tried to get more information from the second source but did not hear back before the story came out.
On top of current supply chain software, Ameba’s platform uses generative AI to give retailers a better understanding of their global supply chains. It does this by collecting data from many different sources so that retailers can predict problems and fix them as they happen. The company says it can cut down on entering data by hand by 30%.
Cedrik Hoffmann, founder of Ameba, told TechCrunch, “In supply chains, especially in the fashion consumer space, a lot of very important data is not being captured right now.” “The things in stores are often sold for too little or too much, or they’re never in stock,”
He said that Ameba collects these unstructured data points that cost systems don’t: “We free that information from the information silos, bring them to a central source, and make the insights that are gleaned from them available to the right people in your organization.”
Co-founder Craig Massie said their core AI is a mix of basic models, such as Open AI: “It changes based on the task and what our benchmarks show works best for that task.” Our multi-step agents are the one thing that stays the same when we use AI: they can do things like read your supplier emails, WhatsApps, and attachments, study your ontology and its connections, and take action.
Plank, a British business making lighting and hardware for the home, has used Ameba to send 140 alerts about important production and delivery delays that they would have missed or forgotten.
Hoffman was the supply chain director and co-founder of the e-commerce company VALOREO. Before joining Ameba, he worked at Palantir as an engineer.
Visionaries Club led Ameba’s pre-seed round before this one, and Anamcara Capital also took part in the funding round.
In a statement, Isabella Yamamoto, principal at Visionaries Club, said, “After talking to many supply chain owners, we were sure that Cedrik and Craig had the experience to build a disruptive business using AI to get rid of fragmentation in supply chains and give brands a competitive edge.”
