Traditional retailers have a pressing problem. Fast-moving companies like Shein and Tem rely on dedicated end-to-end supply chains to eat their lunch. Meanwhile, incumbent retailers remain stuck with traditional platforms, grappling with myriad data sets and struggling to respond to the demanding speed of the market.
One London-based startup thinks it has a solution to this problem. Ameba claims it can harness unstructured data within retailers' supply chain systems and sprinkle it with generative AI to make the whole thing more efficient.
The startup has now raised $7.1 million in a seed round led by London-based VC firm Hedosophia. Hedosophia has a reputation for rarely disclosing which companies it invests in. TechCrunch reached out to the latter for further comment, but did not receive a response so far. Publications.
Ameba's platform uses AI generated on top of existing supply chain software to provide retailers with insights into global supply chains, extracting data from a wide range of sources to predict disruptions and address bottlenecks. Masu. The company claims it can reduce manual data entry by 30%.
“A lot of very important data in the supply chain, especially in the fashion consumer space, is currently not being collected,” Ameba founder Cedric Hoffman told TechCrunch. “Often things in the store are sold at the wrong price, or out of stock, etc.”
He said Ameba captures these unstructured data points that cost systems don't have. “We will make this clear to the relevant parties within the organization.''
Co-founder Craig Massey said the company's underlying AI is a mix of different base models, including open AI, “which performs best for the task at hand and the benchmarks for that task. At the heart of our entire use of AI is our multi-step agent, which performs actions and explores the ontology and its connections, including supplier emails and WhatsApps. , and can read attachments.
So far, British interior hardware and lighting company Plank has used Ameba to generate 140 alerts highlighting critical production and delivery delays that were previously overlooked or overlooked.
Before Ameba, Mr. Hoffman was a former supply chain director and co-founder of e-commerce company VALOREO, and Mr. Massey was a former engineer at Palantir.
Visionaries Club and Anamcara Capital, which previously led Ameba's pre-seed round, also participated in this funding round.
Visionaries Club President Isabella Yamamoto said in a statement: “After speaking with many supply chain owners, we believe Cedric and Craig have the experience to leverage AI to defragment supply chains and build disruptive businesses that unlock competitive advantage. “I did” brand. ”