Former Amazon Executive Dave Clark Raises $100M for AI-Powered Supply Chain Startup Auger

Former Amazon executive Dave Clark raises $100M for new supply chain startup - SiliconANGLE

Former Amazon executive Dave Clark raises $100M for new supply chain startup Dave Clark, the former head of Amazon.com Inc.'s consumer business, has raised $100 million in funding for a new supply chain software startup. Auger Inc., as the company is called, disclosed the seed investment today. It detailed that venture capital firm Oak HC/FT led the raise. Clark left Amazon in 2022 following a more than two-decade career at the online retail and cloud computing giant. He was most recently the Chief Executive Officer of the company's consumer business, which includes its flagship e-commerce marketplace. Clark earlier played a key role in building the transportation network that underpins Amazon's supply chain. Between his stint at Amazon and the launch of Auger, Clark briefly held the top post at supply chain startup Flexport Inc. The latter company develops a widely-used logistics management platform of the same name. It helps enterprises perform tasks such as booking space in delivery trucks for their merchandise. Bellevue, Washington-based Auger also competes in the logistics software market. It's developing a platform intended to help large enterprises manage their supply chains. The application will use artificial intelligence to automate some of the data management tasks involved in the process. According to TechCrunch, one of the AI features that Auger plans to offer is an information retrieval chatbot. The tool will enable logistics teams to access data such as merchandise shipment records using natural language prompts. One of the use cases that Auger plans to target with its platform is supply chain planning. That's the task of determining the most efficient way to procure a given piece of merchandise and ship it to a company's facilities. The process requires logistics teams to find a reliable supplier, identify the fastest delivery route and complete upwards of dozens of other steps. Forecasting is another task that Auger hopes to ease. To reduce cost overruns, retailers use AI to estimate future customer demand and adjust the amount of merchandise they order accordingly. Furthermore, Auger's platform will reportedly also streamline some of the financial tasks involved in managing merchandise shipments. Currently, enterprises use upwards of a dozen different applications to perform the logistics chores that Auger seeks to ease. The company positions its platform as a simpler alternative to those tools. Augur reportedly hopes to provide a user experience akin to consumer-focused software products.

Former Amazon executive Dave Clark raises $100M for new supply chain startup Auger - SiliconANGLE

Former Amazon executive Dave Clark raises $100M for new supply chain startup Auger Dave Clark, the former head of Amazon.com Inc.'s consumer business, has raised $100 million in funding for a new supply chain software startup. Auger Inc., as the company is called, disclosed the seed investment today. It detailed that venture capital firm Oak HC/FT led the raise. Clark left Amazon in 2022 following a more than two-decade career at the online retail and cloud computing giant. He was most recently the Chief Executive Officer of the company's consumer business, which includes its flagship e-commerce marketplace. Clark earlier played a key role in building the transportation network that underpins Amazon's supply chain. Between his stint at Amazon and the launch of Auger, Clark briefly held the top post at supply chain startup Flexport Inc. The latter company develops a widely-used logistics management platform of the same name. It helps enterprises perform tasks such as booking space in delivery trucks for their merchandise. Bellevue, Washington-based Auger also competes in the logistics software market. It's developing a platform intended to help large enterprises manage their supply chains. The application will use artificial intelligence to automate some of the data management tasks involved in the process. According to TechCrunch, one of the AI features that Auger plans to offer is an information retrieval chatbot. The tool will enable logistics teams to access data such as merchandise shipment records using natural language prompts. One of the use cases that Auger plans to target with its platform is supply chain planning. That's the task of determining the most efficient way to procure a given piece of merchandise and ship it to a company's facilities. The process requires logistics teams to find a reliable supplier, identify the fastest delivery route and complete upwards of dozens of other steps. Forecasting is another task that Auger hopes to ease. To reduce cost overruns, retailers use AI to estimate future customer demand and adjust the amount of merchandise they order accordingly. Furthermore, Auger's platform will reportedly also streamline some of the financial tasks involved in managing merchandise shipments. Currently, enterprises use upwards of a dozen different applications to perform the logistics chores that Auger seeks to ease. The company positions its platform as a simpler alternative to those tools. Augur reportedly hopes to provide a user experience akin to consumer-focused software products.

Dave Clark, formerly of Amazon and Flexport, just landed $100M for new supply chain venture | TechCrunch

Dave Clark has had a rollercoaster of a time these past two years. After stepping down in June 2022 as CEO of Amazon's worldwide consumer division -- a role he held for over two decades -- Clark relocated to Dallas to join supply chain logistics company Flexport. With a board mandate to prepare Flexport to go public, Clark led as co-CEO, and later on as CEO, while founder Ryan Peterson transitioned to executive chairman. But all did not go smoothly. In September 2023, Flexport's board, led by Peterson, pressured Clark to resign, accusing him of mismanagement. Clark maintained he was only trying to fix what he considered "extensive" organizational problems. Subsequent reporting backed up Clark's claims, but the damage was done. Clark was out. Clark mulled a gubernatorial run in Texas; he hired strategists, too. But the allure of launching a business -- one he could run as he saw fit -- proved to be stronger. Clark on Tuesday unveiled his new company, Auger, and he's raised a mammoth, $100 million seed round led by VC firm Oak HC/FT. Auger is developing an AI-powered tool for supply chain-dependent businesses that integrates with existing inventory management platforms to deliver real-time insights. "Throughout my career, I've seen first-hand how broken supply chains don't just impact companies, but in fact millions of people: delays that prevent products from reaching shelves, miscommunications that force employees into overtime, higher consumer prices, and inefficiencies that contribute to a growing carbon footprint," Clark told TechCrunch. "These aren't just business problems -- they're human problems. And it's time we fix them." Clark was vague about what precisely Auger is building, save that it "unifies" supply chain data for various types of aggregation. There seems to a chatbot component, too: Clark says users will be able to "just ask" questions like "Give me inventory information for next week's shipment," and Auger will serve up that data "instantly" in a "consumer-grade" portal. "Despite heavy investments, companies still rely on fragmented 'Franken-software' -- disjointed systems patched together from incompatible technologies that don't communicate effectively," Clark said. "This leads to inefficient workarounds and forces critical decisions to be made using tools like Excel, which were never designed to handle the complexity of supply chains at this scale. Auger is creating a new solution for companies seeking better options." To Clark's point, there's robust demand for technology that helps organizations make sense of their supply chains. According to one source, 56% of retailers hold weeks' worth of "safety stock" as insurance against supply chain visibility setbacks. The lack of supply chain awareness -- combined with growing supply chain headwinds, from dockworker strikes to turmoil in the Red Sea -- is contributing to major global shipping disruptions. About a third of services companies and nearly half of manufacturers are having difficulty obtaining supplies, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey. "Increasing disruptions and global conflicts [are] creating near-constant modifications in worldwide manufacturing and the flow of goods, stretching existing technology beyond its limits," Clark said. The more recent hurdles, combined with challenges introduced by the pandemic, have led to an explosion in the number of startups tackling supply chain visibility and management. The sector for logistics software is on track to reach $46.5 billion by 2025, per Markets and Markets. And funding is flowing healthily into upstart supply chain platform vendors -- startups in the space received $15.4 billion in investments this year. Indeed, Auger, based in Bellevue, Washington, is entering a market chock full of formidable rivals. Altana, which bagged $200 million from investors in July, uses an AI system to create a shared view of international supply chain networks, drawing from both logistics and B2B data. Everstream and Pando offer their own dashboards for analysis, intended to complement transportation management and supplier relationship management systems. Clark asserts that what Auger's making will be truly different. "Auger will integrate data from multiple sources and use advanced AI and machine learning to generate automated, dynamic insights in real time," Clark said. "The platform will offer a single pane of glass across planning, forecasting, and financing [to] ... enable teams to move beyond manual tasks and focus on driving innovation." Clark may well have what it takes to go up against the larger vendors in the SaaS supply chain software space. Logistics is his speciality, after all. At Amazon, Clark was an early proponent of robotic automation, which saved the company tens of millions of dollars. And, during the pandemic, Clark dramatically expanded Amazon's operations to meet the elevated demand for online goods. Clark has made big managerial missteps, on the other hand. He misjudged the reception of Amazon's brick-and-mortar businesses, and, in the final stretch of the pandemic, over-expanded the company's warehouse capacity. That latter decision led to billions in cost overruns. Oak general partner Matt Streisfeld has confidence in Clark, calling him a "once-in-a-lifetime" founder with the potential to "reimagine supply chain management software." "We are in the midst of a critical shift, with more data shifting to the cloud every day," Streisfeld said in a statement. "With this shift, we will have more accessible information that can be structured for not only real-time, continuous planning, but also so that AI can be layered on to automate more workflows and deliver more business and financial insights for inventory management and forecasting." Clark says that Auger, which has yet to secure customers or generate any revenue, will release more information about its product roadmap and milestones in the coming months. "Our founding team is made up of relentless problem-solvers with a proven track record of delivering transformative supply chain solutions at scale," he added. "This is just the beginning."

Former Amazon and Flexport leader Dave Clark has raised $100 million to bet on himself

In over two decades at Amazon, Dave Clark oversaw the transformation of the online retailer into a shipping and delivery giant, before rising to the No. 2 exec role alongside founder Jeff Bezos and eventually Bezos' successor, Andy Jassy. Now Clark is channeling that lifetime of experience, plus learnings from a brief, turbulent stint atop supply chain startup Flexport, to bet on himself. Clark founded a new AI-powered supply chain startup called Auger this summer, and has raised $100 million in Series A funding entirely from the investment firm Oak HC/FT, he told Fortune in an interview on Monday. Clark's aim is to help midsize enterprises with global supply chains - think the Fortune 500 outside of the top 50 - integrate various supply chain systems from different providers into a single operating system that looks more like a consumer app than a clunky enterprise solution. "The software doesn't really talk to each other; a friend of mine calls it Franken software," Clark said of traditional supply chain systems. "The pieces all come together but don't [work] together, and so people end up setting up teams of analysts with Excel. A shocking amount of the world's supply chain actually runs on Excel." With Auger, Clark aims to let business users get real-time answers to pressing questions around shipments, forecasting, and other critical areas through simple text queries. Such visibility should help increase a supply chain's efficiency while lowering costs, Clark believes. "How do we allow companies to run their supply chains with the same level of simplicity and elegance as the consumer applications that they use every day?" Clark asked rhetorically. "The technology totally exists to do that, and I think it just hasn't been put together." Clark said the sweet spot for an Auger customer will be companies that have global supply chains but aren't so large as to employ massive in-house technology divisions. The startup will likely focus its efforts on U.S.-based companies at the start, but hopes to eventually expand beyond that including into the government and defense spaces. Clark moved back to Washington state from Texas to launch Auger, which is headquartered in Bellevue. The startup plans to grow to 30 to 40 employees in the next six months, according to a spokesperson. Auger hasn't yet released a product nor has Clark decided which AI model or models the startup would use. Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, retiring from the company in 2022 as CEO of its global consumer business, where he reported to Amazon CEO Bezos and later to his successor, Jassy. Clark spent almost a decade of his time at Amazon in roles more or less equivalent to a chief supply chain officer, launching and scaling Amazon's last-mile delivery network and laying the foundation for a new regional warehouse structure that the company says has helped increase shipping speeds. Clark left Amazon for the CEO job at the freight software startup Flexport, in part due to friction with Jassy, his new boss. But Clark spent just a year at the startup before Flexport founder Ryan Petersen pushed him and his deputies out in a dramatic, befuddling move. Clark, who said he hasn't spoken to Petersen or to Jassy anytime recently, had been reported to be considering a run for Texas governor in 2026. But he told Fortune that he decided not to throw his hat in the ring after Gov. Greg Abbott announced earlier this year that he intended to run for re-election. "He's a great governor," Clark said of Abbott, though he noted that he hoped to eventually get into politics, in part because of his disillusionment with career politicians. "Much of the problems we talk about today, whether immigration or anything else, are highly solvable problems that rational people on both sides share probably 80% or 90% of the same objectives and cannot get the ball across the line because it's just too good politically for their careers to fight," he said. "I think if you have a world where politicians...that's not their career...you have a higher probability of solving some of these intractable issues that linger and create lots of dysfunction in the world." As for Auger, Clark said he had visions of tackling a similar problem at Flexport to what he now is at his own startup. "I went to Flexport with this idea that we could build the same kind of things we built at Amazon but for other businesses," Clark said. "And that was kind of the intent when I went there but we ended up not aligned on the mission in the same way." Now he gets a second chance. With a $100 million warchest behind him.