Supply chain startup, Auger, led by Amazon’s chief operating officer, raises $50M and sells to major customers.

While investors spent much of the spring worrying that frontier AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI would eat up the software industry, Dave Clark was closing a round of funding for the type of business software he’s said to revolutionize.

Auger, a Bellevue, Wash.-based logistics technology startup formerly owned by Amazon, has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Eclipse, with existing investor Oak HC/FT also participating in the new round.

The round brings total funding to $150 million for the company, which has grown to about 130 employees and counts the virtual reality and augmented reality division of Meta, sports retail giant Fanatics, and consumer products maker Kimberly-Clark among its clients.

Clark’s view is that general-purpose AI can generate insights but cannot handle specialized domains such as supply chain management. Making financial and operational decisions at the scale of large companies requires systems built on solid supply chain knowledge — what Auger calls its ontology, essentially a detailed map of how supply chains actually work.

“A lot of tech companies have died on supply chain hill over the last decade,” said Clark, the company’s chief executive, in an interview this week. “You really need to understand the complexities and needs of the context.”

Auger sits on top of a company’s existing systems — ERP, inventory management, logistics management, and demand planning tools — and consolidates data into a single operational layer. Rather than replacing those systems, it connects them, using AI agents and traditional models to make decisions and automate them, as much as possible.

For example, in a recent demo at the company’s Bellevue office, Clark demonstrated how the system would handle a supplier missing a delivery commitment when there isn’t enough product to go around. Auger identifies shortages, decides which customers get priority, reallocates inventory, and pushes the updated plan back into the company’s existing systems.

Most supply chain software, Clark said, generates alerts and waits for someone to act. Auger is designed to make routine decisions on its own and flag exceptions for human review.

“We’re not really a tool,” he said. “We’re really young workers.”

At Fanatics, a sports marketing company, Clark said about 85% of the decisions in the Auger-run system are independent, with the goal of reaching the mid-90s soon. In addition to the customers we have named so far, Clark said eight to 10 other companies are in contract negotiations or pilot programs.

Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, rising to lead the company’s global operations and later its global consumer business. He left in 2022 and became CEO of Flexport, a shipping startup, but that tenure lasted less than a year amid a period of turmoil at the company.

He launched Auger in 2024 with a team that included Leigh Anne Clark, whose wife, who serves as co-founder and president of the company’s fashion and beauty division, is focused on what Clark describes as one of the most wasteful chains outside of grocery.

Clark returned to the Seattle area from Texas to tap into the region’s talent pool, and raised a $100 million Series A from Oak HC/FT. The company quickly assembled a C-suite drawn heavily from Amazon’s top ranks, as well as leaders from Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Salesforce, covering the functions of procurement, AI, data science, and product development.

In March, Auger was named the lead supply chain partner for Microsoft Fabric, the technology giant’s data platform. The Auger product is built on Azure, and Microsoft resellers can earn a commission on Auger deals. Clark said the partnership has produced some discussion but it’s still early days.

Clark said Auger exited the Series B first, before the company needed it, to avoid disrupting the fundraising during what it expected to be a busy period for customers.

With the investment, Eclipse partner Jiten Behl joined Auger’s board, which also includes Clark, president and CFO Alex Ceballos, and Oak HC/FT’s Matt Streisfeld.

Auger did not disclose revenue or other financial metrics, but Clark said the amount is nearly double the amount set by Auger’s first round. “We didn’t shoot to test a crazy amount of stars,” he said. “We stayed in a place where we felt comfortable.”

That pragmatic approach extends to the way Auger works. In Bellevue, the company is operating out of an office that was vacated after Microsoft vacated the space. Auger has kept the desks, monitors, and chairs the tech giant left behind, giving away its new offices for free.

But Clark’s ambitions for the company are modest. He said Auger’s goal is to have half of the US GDP flow from its territory by 2030, with revenues exceeding $1 billion.

“That takes a sharp turn to get there,” he said. “We don’t play small.”