Traditional retailers have a pressing problem. Fast-moving like Shein and Temu are eating their lunch by leveraging purpose-built, end-to-end supply chains. Meanwhile, incumbent retailers are still stuck on legacy platforms, juggling a myriad number of data sets, and struggling to respond to a punishingly fast market.
A London-based startup thinks it has the solution to this problem. Ameba claims to be able to the unstructured data in a retailer’s supply chain systems, sprinkle in some generative AI, and make the whole thing more efficient. The startup has now raised a $7.
1 million seed round led by London-based VC firm Hedosophia , which has gained a reputation for rarely revealing which companies it invests in. TechCrunch 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 give retailers insights into their global supply chains, extracting data from a wide range of sources in order to predict disruptions and react to bottlenecks.
The company claims it can reduce manual data input by 30%. “In supply chains, particularly in the fashion consumer space, a lot of very important data is currently not being captured,” Ameba’s founder, Cedrik Hoffmann, told TechCrunch. “A lot of times, the things that are in the shops are sold at the wrong cost or they’re out of stock, or whatever.
” He said Ameba captures these unstructured data points that c.