AI

Orderful nabs $35M to streamline supply chain data management

Orderful Inc., a startup using artificial intelligence to make supply chains more efficient, today announced that it has raised $35 million in funding. 

The Series C round was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies with participation from NewRoad Capital. It brings Orderful’s total outside funding to $85 million.

Retailers regularly exchange documents with their suppliers and the shipping companies that deliver those suppliers’ merchandise to stores. Such documents are known as EDI, or electronic data interchange, records. They contain supply chain information such as shipment details and payment terms.

Large retailers often require their suppliers and shipping providers to structure EDI documents in a company-specific format. That standardization reduces data entry errors, but also creates technical challenges. As a result, adding a new manufacturer to a retailer’s supply chain can take weeks. Orderful has developed an AI platform called Mosaic that it says can reduce the onboarding workflow to a few hours or days.

The software also eases several related tasks. Suppliers and shipping companies must often pay penalties if they submit an EDI document that doesn’t comply with a retailer’s requirements. Those requirements change from time to time, which increases the risk of formatting errors. Mosaic can automatically detect when a retailer changes its document formatting guidelines and adjust users’ EDI files accordingly.

Companies often sync data from EDI documents to internal applications such as enterprise resource planning tools. In the past, such data sharing necessitated custom integrations. According to Orderful, Mosaic removes that requirement and thereby lowers costs.

“EDI has been broken for 40+ years. Not because the problem was unsolvable, but because no one was willing to rebuild it from the ground up,” said Orderful founder and Chief Executive Officer Erik Kiser. “With Mosaic, we did.”

The company offers the platform alongside two other tools likewise focused on easing supply chain management tasks.

The first product, Pixel, enables enterprises to exchange EDI documents with multiple partners through a single web console. Historically, consumer goods manufacturers often had to set up a separate portal for each retailer in their partner network. Pixel also removes the need to manually fill forms with a feature that automatically turns natural language input into EDI documents.

Orderful’s third tool eases the task of printing shipping labels. Like EDI documents, the shipping labels that a supplier attaches to its packages must follow guidelines specified by the retailer buying the merchandise. Not meeting the customer’s requirements can lead to financial penalties. According to Orderful, its software automatically generates printable label designs that comply with retailer requirements.

The company claims to have facilitated more than 6 billion EDI transactions to date. Orderful says that its tools can reduce the amount of time involved in adding a new partner to a retailer’s supply chain by a factor of 10 and lower the associated costs.

The software maker will invest its newly raised capital in feature development. In particular, Orderful plans to develop capabilities that will help retailers monitor their supply chain and automate certain administrative tasks.

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