The retail sector needs Inventory planning to maintain margins and meet demand. This is getting harder because there are now many distribution channels, more complex supply chains, and shorter sales cycles. Mid-market retailers and premium brands have less firepower than the retail giants and tend to rely on legacy software.
Founded in 2020, Autone aims to forecast demand, and aid sales, while cutting waste and manual tasks.
The company has now raised a $17 million Series A funding round, led by General Catalyst. Previous investors also participated, including Speedinvest, YCombinator, Seedcamp, 2100VC, Motier, Financière Saint James, and angels from LVMH, Sephora, and Moncler. The new funding takes the total raised for the company to $20 million, including a $3 million Seed round led by Speedinvest. Its competitors include Anaplan, BlueYonder and Relex.
Born and raised in Paris, Autone co-founder and CEO Adil Bouhdadi first got into sneaker culture in the early 2000s. Later, he wanted to enter the luxury fashion business, but with few connections, he decided to incessantly refresh the LVMH career website until an internship at Givenchy came up. He ended up spending six months shadowing the CEO.
After a Masters’s Degree in 2013, he got a break at Alexander Wang in New York, moved to Victoria Beckham in London, and joined Alexander McQueen in 2015.
While there, Bouhdadi and colleague Harry Glucksmann-Cheslaw (now Autone CTO) both worked on an internal inventory platform which, they claim, helped the brand’s revenue increase substantially over the following five years. The co-founders are a Muslim and Jewish pairing. Adil comes from a Muslim family (his parents moved to Paris from Morocco) and his co-founder comes from a Jewish family who moved to the UK to escape the Holocaust.
Bouhdadi (now CEO) told TechCrunch: “At Alexander McQueen we realized everyone in the company was just literally using Excel. The biggest pain point for any retail company is that they all operate in silos. We created the alpha version to Autone there.”
He said Autone can now look at a retail brand’s products in the next 12 months: “You can purchase raw materials in one month instead of three, reduce the inventory risk, and have a variable supply chain.”
Autone now counts companies such as Courreges, Roberto Cavalli, Stussy, and Zadig&Voltaire amongst its customer.