In This Article:
Tesla famously struggled to scale up production of the Model 3 sedan in 2018 -- so much so that CEO Elon Musk said his company was weeks away from collapsing. That near-death experience helped spawn a whole new company called Atomic that's built around using AI to streamline supply chains.
Co-founded by former Tesla employees Michael Rossiter and Neal Suidan, Atomic was created inside DVx Ventures, the firm run by former Tesla president Jon McNeill. Rossiter is also a partner at DVx, which has led a $3 million seed round for Atomic, with Seattle-based Madrona Ventures joining.
"Michael and Neil experienced this pain firsthand as leaders at Tesla in the supply chain, and I saw that work firsthand -- because they worked for me," McNeill said in an interview with TechCrunch.
Atomic plans to deploy its agentic AI with customers to make inventory planning faster and easier. It's already been working with pilot customers. In one case, the customer was able to cut inventory levels in half while maintaining a 99% in-stock rate.
Being able to strike a balance like that frees up working capital that a business can use in other places, while also reducing risk, McNeill said.
"If you have too much capital tied up in inventory, you could really harm the business. And if you have too little, where you don't have the right things in stock when the customer is ready to purchase, then you're costing yourself big time," he said.
More broadly, Atomic's early customers have been in the consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, and apparel industries. The company claims it has helped those customers reduce inventory costs by 20% to 50%.
With so much uncertainty in the world right now, there's big demand for solutions like Atomic's because existing ones aren't built for this kind of volatility, Suidan said in an interview.
Currently, "planners will, like, lock themselves in a room for a week trying to put together different scenarios, present those back to the leadership, and get a question they weren't anticipating," Suidan said. Then they "have to go back to these documents, spend a few days, and it's becomes this process that can be all consuming for them, because they don't have the tools available to manage the uncertainty with confidence."
Atomic's software pulls information from those same source documents but lets inventory planners and supply chain team members quickly simulate multiple scenarios -- something that would normally take hours or days.