Supply chains are messy. San Francisco-based startup Loop isn’t content with helping companies clean up their supply chains. Instead, the startup uses AI to provide companies with predictions, and even prescriptions, for remedies — almost like an ideal healthcare provider.
“I do an annual test, and it’s like, oh I have to go more,” Loop founder and CTO Shaosu Liu said in an interview. But that’s not the end goal, is it?
The approach helped Loop secure $95 million in a Series C funding round from some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful 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 latest term fund, Growth Equity Partners.
The funding comes at a time when engineering talent is one of the hottest things in tech. Both Liu and his co-founder (and CEO) Matt McKinney — who met while working at Uber — said they would spend more to hire.
But it’s also a changing time for any company with a global supply chain, and that’s helped investment in AI startups adapt.
Deliverr founder Harish Abbott raised an $85 million Series A 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and LinkedIn engineers called Amari AI went undercover in February with the goal of helping retailers modernize their outdated systems. And established players like Uber Freight and Flexport are also making a big push for AI. (Ryan Petersen, Flexport’s founder and CEO, is an early investor in Loop.)
Loop’s pitch is straightforward. The company helps its customers take unstructured data – PDFs without visible characters, sheets of paper, digital messages – and give them structure, to automate tasks. Loop makes automation possible by building a harness that connects multiple AI models. Some are made in-house, while others are frontier models.
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This helps Loop customers better identify where they may be losing money or time, or identify the risk of over- or under-supplying a particular product. Loop’s founders say the system is effective enough to save customers thousands of dollars right out of the gate.
But as Liu said, the goal is to go much further than that — to predict, rather than just diagnose.
To accomplish this, Loop is beginning to gather new types of data from its customers. It also includes customer business resource planning software, transportation management systems, and collecting additional data from suppliers, warehouses, and other interstitial parts of the supply chain.
“Loop dug deep into one of the most difficult parts of the supply chain and made it profitable for their customers,” Valor founder, CEO and chief investment officer Antonio Gracias said in a statement. “With the AI systems they’ve built, they’re taking previously disaggregated and inaccessible data and turning it into intelligence that improves costs, processes, and operations. That foundation extends to other operational and financial functions, which is why Loop is positioned to be the intelligence layer of the entire supply chain.”
Liu sees Gracias’ support for Loop as a big validation of the work his startup is doing, considering that Valor is one of the biggest backers of Elon Musk’s xAI. In a world where AI startups are always looking over their shoulders in frontier labs while trying to dig a trench, Liu said Valor has done “deep due diligence on how Loop’s business will be secured”.
“They have access to top AI researchers, and a visionary on the ground,” he said, with a nod to Musk. “I think it’s very clear that no one follows the background that we follow in the same way, with the same talent.”
McKinney said he and Liu founded Loop on the assumption that the artificial intelligence technology needed to do what they do would not be the cause. But he and Liu think the technology won’t reach that point until 2030. Things are moving fast apparently.
That doesn’t bother him, he told TechCrunch. Instead, McKinney said it allows Loop to focus on doing more for its customers — higher savings, lower risk, and broader resilience in an unpredictable world. And, of course, he thinks Loop’s customers are the most likely to develop into strong businesses regardless of how chaotic things get at any given moment.
“Our belief is that this is one of those times when the companies that rely on them the most, their profits will increase. I think that the companies that you will look at in the next ten years are that [survive] these are the companies that have grown really fast in this 12-month period,” he said.
