Retail-automation startup Duvo.ai has raised $15 million in seed financing to scale its AI-powered operational workforce, a system designed to automate workflows across SAP, legacy portals, email, spreadsheets and even phone calls — cutting manual tasks for retailers by up to 40% within weeks. The investment was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Credo Ventures, Northzone and Puzzle Ventures. Angels included Roy Reznik, co-founder of Wiz; David Singleton, former CTO of Stripe; Ajay Kavan, an industry veteran from Amazon; and Kieran Flanagan, former CMO of Zapier.
Retail, e-commerce and FMCG operators continue to battle thin margins and increasingly complex supplier ecosystems. Many teams still rely on staff manually transferring data across decade-old systems — a patchwork that has proven costly, slow and prone to errors. Traditional enterprise IT replacements can take years and require millions in investment, leaving modernisation out of reach for many operators.
Duvo.ai, founded by retail veteran Tomas Čupr, the entrepreneur behind grocery unicorn Rohlik, aims to replace that bottleneck with AI agents capable of running operational tasks end-to-end across a retailer’s existing systems. Teams can describe goals in natural language, and agents execute autonomously — whether that means updating data in SAP, reconciling spreadsheets or placing supplier phone calls. Early customers report a 40% reduction in manual workloads.
Čupr, CEO and Co-Founder of Duvo.ai, said the idea emerged from watching teams across Rohlik spend most of their week “living in copy-paste.”
“We hire people for judgment and relationships, but we ask them to move data between spreadsheets, emails and portals. At some point that stopped being an efficiency issue and became personal. I wanted to build an AI workforce that gives people back their time for meaningful work.”
He added that Duvo.ai’s core philosophy is autonomy:
“Our agents log into SAP and other ERPs, work in portals, read and send emails, update systems and escalate only when human judgment is truly needed.”
Because Duvo.ai is designed for business users — not technical teams — commercial, finance and supply-chain staff can build and refine assistants without waiting for lengthy IT initiatives. The platform ships with pre-configured AI agents for margin reviews, promotion activation, invoice reconciliation, assortment optimisation and supplier onboarding. Retailers typically begin with one team or market, validate impact quickly, and expand without replacing existing software.
Jan Hammer, the partner who led the round for Index Ventures, said the team’s deep operational background is central to the company’s differentiation.
“Many AI companies are building horizontal tools and hoping to find a vertical application. Duvo is doing the opposite — building specifically for retail, an industry that has long been underserved by modern automation.”
Duvo.ai’s leadership includes Marek Paris (CPTO) and Martin Pecha (COO), both of whom previously held senior operational roles at Rohlik. Their thesis: if AI can automate retail — one of the most fragmented and exception-heavy environments — it can automate virtually any operational category.
The company’s 15-person team is already supporting multi-billion-dollar retailers and FMCG groups under six-figure annual contracts. Funding will be used to expand hiring, strengthen product development and enter additional verticals where operational complexity demands resilient automation.
Editorial Analysis: Why Duvo.ai Represents a New Phase of Enterprise Automation
The rise of enterprise AI has often been slowed by the high cost of integration and the challenge of replacing entrenched systems. Duvo.ai is attacking this friction point head-on. Its strategy — embedding AI into existing workflows rather than forcing system overhauls — mirrors a broader shift toward pragmatic automation. This is particularly powerful in sectors like retail, where thousands of daily decisions and supplier interactions rely on outdated interfaces that cannot be easily replaced.
Another critical advantage is Duvo.ai’s operator-led founding team. Their decades of hands-on retail experience give the platform an authenticity many generic AI tools lack. They are not building hypothetical solutions; they are solving the exact pain points they have lived through. That depth of domain knowledge is becoming increasingly essential as industries move from experimentation to AI-driven execution.
Looking at the broader market, Duvo.ai is well-positioned to influence how large organisations think about workforce augmentation. By blending autonomy, accountability and system-wide execution, the company is setting a template for what operational AI could look like in the next decade — not just in retail but in any environment where teams wrestle with repetitive, rule-based work across incompatible systems.
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