Stylos, a platform that helps commodity-based businesses (like those in metals, food and airline companies) manage financial risk, a $20 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz announced Tuesday.
Others in the first round include Crucible Capital, Gallery Ventures and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. The company has raised $23 million to date.
Founded in 2023, Pillar automates hedging processes for such businesses. Hedging is when a company places a trade that can offset or cancel out losses from other price trades. Geopolitics has not been kind to the commodity market, which has seen a lot of volatility over the past year.
Harsha Ramesh, co-founder and CEO of the company (which was co-founded with Chinmay Deshpande, the company’s CTO), said the company uses artificial intelligence to ingest and analyze data from customer contracts, cash flow, inventory, ERP software, spreadsheets and even WhatsApp messages to “continuously analyze exposure to FXmo and FXmo.”
It can then build and manage a hedging portfolio for its clients and automatically adjust positions based on “market conditions, volatility and the client’s risk tolerance,” Ramesh continued. The platform executes trades and continuously monitors risk and exposure, transforming hedging from a “static, periodic decision to a continuous, autonomous system,” Ramesh said.
Pillar’s clients include Shibuya Sakura Industries, a trading company that buys and sells commodities such as metals. the recyclable materials company Sigma Recycling. and United Metal Solutions Group, which also recycles and trades metals.
Ramesh was once a macro trader, managing large derivatives trading portfolios and working with some of the world’s largest firms as they sought to hedge currency and interest rate exposure, he said. “I also spent time at a medium-sized physical import-export business,” he recalls.
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“What stood out was that sophisticated institutions had access to tools, infrastructure and talent, while the real producers, importers and manufacturers who drove global trade had little or no access to it,” he said. “Risk management was treated as a luxury, even though it was necessary.”
Pillar hopes to provide sophisticated, institutional-grade tools to small and medium-sized businesses. “Our goal is to make compensation as accessible and ubiquitous as payment or accounting software,” he said.
Others in this business include traditional desks at major banks and commodity risk platforms such as Topaz and RadarRadar.
Ramesh said people are still in the loop in some way at Pillar, handling “approvals, oversight and strategic decisions.” Humans also help in more “complex situations” — such as large transactions, where a human team will mix their judgment with machine execution.
