13 December 2018
Verusen: The Intelligent Supply Chain
Since this article was written, AUTIT has changed their name to Verusen.
As AI-first investors, we love hearing about new ways to solve age-old problems with machine learning. And we get really excited when we see ways for these techniques to address problems that have been historically neglected by the tech industry!
Supply chains are complicated and inefficient; and at times, curiously untouched by innovation. That’s why we were so excited to meet AUTIT and hear some fresh ideas for manufacturers. Their beachhead is the indirect supply chain, also known as MRO. MRO are the parts that keep a manufacturing line running, from engine casings to ball bearings to safety glasses.
Redundant MRO inventory has become a chronic and industry-wide problem for manufacturers, for a combination of reasons: people who manage MRO are focused on avoiding downtime (rather than avoiding waste), and lack of coordination across plants makes it easy to accumulate redundancy. What’s keeping manufacturers from solving the problem is the lack of clean, accurate, and current data about MRO inventory.
AUTIT’s founders have cracked two key problems: first, cleaning, unifying, and harmonizing MRO sku data and second, building models that can predict the need for parts on the assembly line. Their neural network-based architecture gets smarter with every part tagged and every production line optimized, representing multiple virtuous loops of data. Between the two, they enable manufacturers to make smarter tradeoffs when managing inventory, initially for MRO and ultimately far beyond.
AUTIT has the unfair advantage of the perfect team to tackle this problem — the blend of domain knowledge (Paul) and technology expertise (JR and George) means we have a team that deeply understands the problem they are solving and can invent novel techniques to solve it. Situated in Atlanta, Georgia, they are connected with a burgeoning tech scene and embedded in the community of manufacturers who will be their customers and partners.
We’re thrilled to partner with our friends at Glasswing to back AUTIT to bring about the Intelligence Era for manufacturers!
