Gradient Ventures Leads $6.3m Investment In Predictive SaaS For Inventory In Commerce Venture Syrup Tech
New funds will scale Syrup’s AI-powered platform, expand its reach and increase use cases along the end-to-end inventory planning workflow
Syrup Tech, the AI-powered predictive software platform for inventory excellence in commerce, raised $6.3m in funding led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. The round also included Flybridge Capital, Firstminute Capital, Rackhouse Ventures, as well as Angel investors incl. (former) executives at Adidas, Bonobos, Salesforce, ASOS, ThredUp, Casper, Zalando, and Stripe. 1984 Ventures, who led the company’s pre-seed round last year, continued investing in this round.
“Inventory planning is such a critical function that drives any brand or retailers’ profitability and sustainability – and yet, it’s managed by spreadsheets and bad legacy software,” said James Theuerkauf, CEO and Co-Founder of Syrup. “Syrup provides predictive software that delivers AI-driven recommendations on orders and allocations directly to merchandise planners, driving full-price sell-thru, more efficient workflows, and less waste.”
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The funding will be used to service new and existing demand from Syrup’s fast-growing list of customers, as well as develop new modules and features. The funding comes on the heels of Syrup winning the SXSW 2022 competition in the “Enterprise and Smart Data” category in Austin, TX earlier this year.
“Today, it’s harder than ever to accurately forecast inventory demand due to macroeconomic factors like supply chain disruptions and labor shortages,” said Zachary Bratun-Glennon, Partner at Gradient Ventures. “With Syrup, merchandisers and planners can easily access rich datasets to inform their inventory plans down to the SKU, which is critical for any company looking to optimize their business. We’re proud to back James and his team and look forward to what’s next.”
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As omni-channel brands and retailers look to migrate from excel-based planning and poor legacy systems, Syrup provides an intuitive, AI-based system that generates recommendations for merchandisers and planners, empowering them with data-driven decision support. The proprietary technology plugs into internal systems to analyze internal data (e.g. transactions, e-comm, marketing, inventory data), that is enhanced with external sources (e.g. social media trends, weather). Syrup’s recommendations are powered both by advanced forecasting and stochastic optimization models.
Syrup’s customers are seeing double digit increases in profit margins through reductions in stock-outs, significant reductions in excess inventory and waste, while more efficient and less manual workflows are giving time back to highly stretched merchandising teams.
