Ameba, the AI-driven platform helping companies manage and unlock growth from their complex supply chains, has today announced a £6m Seed round led by Hedosophia. Leading European early-stage investor Visionaries Club reinvested, having led Ameba’s pre-Seed round, and Anamcara also participated.
A single source of truth
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.
Market challenges
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.
A growing track record
Ameba’s transformative platform and approach has seen the startup attract a growing customer base across the consumer goods and home decor markets. British interior hardware and lighting company, Plank uses Ameba to manage 300+ products from over 20 suppliers across Asia and Europe, in real-time. Within the first three months Ameba generated over 140 alerts highlighting critical production and delivery delays that would have previously been missed or overlooked. While Evelien Kahn, founder and CEO of MDV said: "Ameba has changed how we operate. Not only are we on top of our supply chain, including inbound and outbound orders, but we’ve also become more scalable and agile.”
More recently, the brand has moved into fashion, onboarding one of Europe’s leading fashion groups, with stores across the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium and suppliers across China and South East Asia. The new funding will fuel Ameba’s further expansion into such sectors desperate for disruption, including fashion and textiles, and accelerate Ameba’s mission to be the go-to supply chain partner for all.
