Supplier delays cost businesses money and consumers are much less likely to buy again due to delayed shipments. In the UK, manufacturers sat on a total of $30 billion worth of unfinished products due to supplier delays in 2022.

Increasing the number of suppliers seems like an easy fix to mitigate macro supply chain disruptions. However, this increases procurement time and short-term delays substantially.

As more companies expand their supplier base, managing them will become an increasingly complex task.

Procurement teams currently lack the tools to manage today’s complex supplier networks. Existing tools fall short as they require manual implementation by suppliers or they are not sufficiently integrated into internal tools.

Ameba is a procurement platform that leverages AI to provide actionable insights on a company’s supply chain.

Centralise - Integrate all existing communication channels into a universal inbox

Insights - Leverage AI to process unstructured files/messages to extract useful insights e.g. early warning about supplier risks and ways to mitigate it

Automate - Reduce follow-up time by up to 10 hours per week

Founder

Cedrik Hoffmann, Co-Founder & CEO - Previously Co-Founder and Director of Supply Chain at Valoreo and Co-CEO at Taipei Molded Products. BSc - Economic History, LSE

Craig Massie, Co-Founder & CTO - Previously Software Engineer at Palantir Technologies and Intern in Microsoft’s Commercial ML Team. MSci - Software Engineering, University of Glasgow

Spotlight Analysis

Strengths

• Product-led growth: With onboarding in less than 2 hours and seamless integration with supplier communication channels, the product has a unique selling point

• Domain expertise: Strong industry knowledge of supplier management and previous experience building enterprise software provides a strong skillset

• Industry tailwind: As companies build global supply chains, management becomes an increasingly important problem to address

Weaknesses

• Adoption risk: procurement teams generally have a low tech penetration so the product needs to be sufficiently tailored to different use cases and easy to use

• Long-term moat: companies will be wary of sharing unique supply chain insights so building a data moat will require a more nuanced approach

Market

Anvyl - Raised $15m Series B led by B Capital Group in February 2022

SourceDay - Raised $32m Series C led by Norwest Venture Partners in February 2022

Key Details

Year founded: 2023

Summary: Ameba is a procurement platform that leverages AI to provide actionable insights on a company’s supply chain.

Currently raising: Yes, raising £1m

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