Ameba, an AI-driven platform helping companies manage and unlock growth from their complex supply chains, has today announced a €6.4 million seed round led by Hedosophia. Leading European early-stage investor Visionaries Club reinvested, having led Ameba’s pre-seed round, and Anamcara also participated.
Ameba’s world-class team of supply chain, AI, quant and deep-tech experts is led by founders Cedrik Hoffmann, former supply chain director and co-founder of e-commerce giant VALOREO, and Craig Massie, the former Palantir engineer who built the S&P 500 firm’s best-in-class data privacy tool.
By leaning on the pair’s experience of solving the most complex business and data challenges, the Ameba platform uses AI on top of existing software to give brands unmatched, real-time, bespoke insights into their global supply chains. It automates the extraction of data in multiple languages from sprawling sources – emails, WhatsApps, PDFs, Excel and more – and brings it into a single “source of truth” platform. With insights into the source and status of every product on a chain, brands can predict disruptions; react to bottlenecks; and get unprecedented visibility into their sustainability efforts. In this way, Ameba empowers brands to become more dynamic and agile in their response to the ever-changing demands of consumers, regulators and industry.
With Ameba, businesses can significantly streamline operations, too, reducing manual data input by 30%, and tackling critical weaknesses along the chain. On average, 50% of supplier orders are delayed, leading to stockouts and resulting in an average of 8% of unrealised revenue annually. Such delays are rarely caused by unexpected events, but rather by persistent and often overlooked inefficiencies; inefficiencies Ameba is built to address. To put the impact of these inefficiencies into perspective, improving suppliers’ on-time delivery (OTIF) to 100%, alone, can cut operational costs for companies by as much as a fifth. What’s more, cutting supply chain costs by as little as 4% has been shown to double profitability.
More broadly, supply chain disruptions can hurt global GDP growth, fuel inflation and see the average business make losses of 62%. Stock shortages bring competitive challenges, with 40% of customers willing to switch brands to find out-of-stock items, as do the constant pressures to adapt to consumer demands and regulation. Established brands, for instance, introduce anywhere from 12,000 to 1.3 million new products a year, creating not only a stock management, but a sustainability challenge. At the same time regulators in the EU are requiring supply chain transparency, through Digital Product Passports (DPPs). These problems are endemic across industry but are critical in sectors such as fashion which have historically lagged behind in digital transformation, yet are under the most pressure to adapt.
“Brands today face intense pressure to meet rapid shifts in consumer trends while delivering on expectations for fast, low-cost, and sustainable supply chains,” said Cedrik Hoffmann, co-founder and CEO of Ameba. “Many of the biggest names in fashion still manage their supply chain data on Excel and communicate with suppliers via email or WhatsApp. We want to transform customers’ operations while meeting them where they are today. With Ameba, we’re turning supply chains from bottlenecks into engines of growth.”
“With brands constantly juggling data, managing sprawling inventories and fighting fires across their supply chains, they have no choice but to be reactive; to address the task or fight the fire directly in front of them,” added Craig Massie, co-founder and CTO of Ameba. “They rarely have time to take a step back, look at their supply chain as a whole and identify areas of untapped efficiency and growth. Ameba finally transforms these reactive processes into proactive solutions that are only possible due to our team’s deep understanding of the market, its challenges and the tech needed to solve them.”
Isabella Yamamoto, Principal at Visionaries Club, added: “We’ve seen immense downward pressure on supply chains across all industries, with organisations fighting against increasing complexity and fragmentation in their supplier base. 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.”
