Supply chains are messy. San Francisco-based startup Loop doesn’t just help companies clean up their supply chains. Instead, the startup uses artificial intelligence to offer companies predictive, even prescriptive, treatments — almost like an ideal healthcare provider.
“I do an annual checkup, and it’s like I’m walking more,” Loop co-founder and CTO Shaosu Liu said in an interview. “But that’s not the end goal, right? The end goal is for someone to teach me about nutrition, for someone to teach me about longevity.”
The approach helped Loop secure a $95 million Series C funding round from some powerful Silicon Valley backers, the company announced Friday. The round was led by Valor Equity Partners and Valor Atreides AI Fund, and includes investments from 8VC, Founders Fund, Index Ventures and JP Morgan’s stage fund Growth Equity Partners.
The funding comes at a time when engineering talent is one of the hottest commodities in tech. Both Liu and co-founder (and CEO) Matt McKinney — who met while working at Uber — said they will use much of that capital for hiring.
But it’s also a volatile time for any company with a global supply chain, and that’s helped boost investment in startups using artificial intelligence to adapt.
Deliverr founder Harish Abbott raised an $85 million Series A round late last year to help automate the work done by shippers and carriers. A startup founded by former Google and LinkedIn engineers called Amari AI emerged from secrecy in February with the goal of helping customs officials modernize their outdated systems. And established players like Uber Freight and Flexport are also making big AI pushes. (Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, is an early investor in Loop.)
Loop’s pitch is pretty simple. The company helps its customers take unstructured data — PDFs without visually recognizable characters, sheets of paper, digital messages — and give them structure in order to automate tasks. Loop makes automation possible by developing a braid that coordinates multiple AI models. Some are internally developed and others are frontier models.
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This helps Loop customers better identify where they may be wasting money or time, or spot the risks of over- or under-supplying a particular product. Loop’s co-founders say the system is efficient enough that it can save customers thousands of dollars right out of the gate.
But as Liu said, the goal is to go much further than that — predictive, rather than just diagnostic.
To achieve this, Loop is starting to integrate newer types of data from its customers. It integrates with customers’ enterprise resource planning software, transportation management systems and aggregates more data from suppliers, warehouses and other supply chain interlocutors.
“Loop has gone deep into one of the most challenging parts of the supply chain and turned it into an asset for their customers,” said Valor’s founder, CEO and chief investment officer Antonio Gracias. “Through the AI systems they’ve built, they’re taking data that was previously fragmented and inaccessible and turning it into intelligence that improves costs, processes and working capital. This foundation extends to other operational and financial functions, so Loop is positioned to become the information layer of the entire supply chain.”
Liu sees Gracias’ support of Loop as an important validation of the work his startup is doing, considering Valor is one of the biggest supporters of Elon Musk’s xAI. In a world where AI startups are constantly looking over their shoulders at frontier labs while trying to dig a moat, Liu said Valor did “very deep due diligence on how defensible the Loop business is going to be.
“They have access to the top AI researchers and a visionary in space,” he said, in a nod to Musk. “I think it’s very clear that no one is really going after the area that we’re looking at with the same rigor, with the same talent.”
McKinney said he and Liu founded Loop under the assumption that the AI technology needed to do what they do wouldn’t be the limiting factor. But he and Liu assumed the technology wouldn’t reach that tipping point until around 2030. Things are clearly moving faster.
That doesn’t bother him, he told TechCrunch. Instead, McKinney said it’s letting Loop focus on doing more for its customers — higher savings, lower risk and broader resilience in an unpredictable world. And, of course, he believes Loop’s customers are the ones most likely to grow into resilient businesses, no matter how chaotic things are at any given moment.
“Our belief is that this is one of those times where the companies that are really leaning, their advantage will be enhanced. I think the companies that you’re going to look at in the next decade that [survive] they’re the companies that really accelerated this 12 months,” he said.
