Syrup Tech Funded $6.3M to Scale-up AI-powered Inventory Platform for Fast-growing Customers

Inventory

Syrup Tech is a New York-based developer of machine learning models designed to predict demand and optimize inventory. The company focuses on apparel and fashion and seeks to support retailers and brands to optimally produce, procure and allocate their inventory, reducing stockouts and excess inventory and enabling clients to make more sustainable and profitable inventory decisions.

Syrup Tech was funded $6.3 million led by Gradient Ventures, with participation from Flybridge Capital, Firstminute Capital, Rackhouse Ventures, 1984 Ventures, and angel investors, including former executives at Adidas, Bonobos, Salesforce, ASOS, ThredUp, Casper, Zalando, and Stripe.

They will utilize the funding to service new and existing demands from Syrup’s fast-growing list of customers and develop new modules and features. For example, social media trends and even the weather spit-out predictive inventory suggestions using artificial intelligence and device learning. This way, merchandisers and planners have better data on what they need and can reduce some of the waste.

James Theuerkauf, the co-founder and CEO of Syrup Tech, explained that inventory prediction has become more complex, particularly as brands battle stockouts, which causes them to overcompensate by ordering more. This can guide excess inventory and the requirement to make reductions, which they recently saw both Walmart and Target have to do to remove their inventories. But unfortunately, all that extra usually ends up in dumps.

The supply chain sufferings are also throwing a wrench in the inventory management tools, and Syrup Tech is operating to provide recommendations sooner rather than later. So if the wait is forty days, merchandisers should get in their orders now, or if the hold is ten days, they can postpone those decisions.

Syrup Tech’s customers (currently working with eight) are seeing double-digit profit margins through reductions in stockouts, excess inventory, and destruction and time saved by eliminating the manual workflows.

Omni-channel brands and retailers examine to migrate from excel-based planning and inadequate legacy systems. Syrup delivers an intuitive, AI-based system that develops recommendations for merchandisers and planners, empowering them with data-driven decision support. The proprietary technology plugs into internal systems to analyze internal data enhanced by external sources. Syrup’s recommendations are power both by advanced forecasting and stochastic optimization models.

Theuerkauf added that the international supply chain is a bit of a blessing because now is the limelight shining on inventory, there is a lot of interest in figuring this out, and a shift from other legacy systems to modern systems.

By: K. Tagura

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