Retail operations are drowning in data entry and legacy software but a new player just emerged to cut the chaotic red tape. Duvo has officially secured $15 million in seed funding to deploy autonomous AI assistants capable of handling complex back-office tasks. This massive round signals a major shift in how the retail industry plans to modernize its aging infrastructure without hiring armies of engineers.
The Legacy Tech Trap Stifling Retail Growth
The modern retail landscape is a high-pressure environment defined by razor-thin margins and fierce competition. Yet the backbone of this industry often relies on technology that is decades old. Big box retailers and e-commerce giants alike struggle with fragmented systems that simply do not talk to each other.
Data silos create a massive operational burden for staff members. Employees spend countless hours manually transferring numbers from supplier spreadsheets into enterprise resource planning systems. This “swivel chair” integration is slow, prone to human error and incredibly costly.
Duvo aims to eliminate this drudgery entirely.
The startup provides AI-native automation that acts more like a digital workforce than a software tool. These are not simple chatbots that answer questions. They are actionable agents designed to log in, navigate menus, click buttons and process transactions just like a human employee would.
This approach addresses a critical pain point. Traditional digital transformation projects are notorious for ballooning budgets and multi-year timelines. Retailers often fear replacing their core systems because the risk of failure is too high. Duvo offers a way to modernize processes immediately without ripping out the underlying infrastructure.
futuristic retail barcode scanner with digital data stream
Investors Bet Big on Agentic AI for Commerce
The $15 million seed round was led by Index Ventures. This firm is a heavyweight in the venture capital world known for backing unicorns like Figma, Revolut and Wiz. Their involvement suggests a high degree of confidence in Duvo’s potential to disrupt the sector.
Other notable participants joined the round to bolster this vision.
- Credo Ventures
- Northzone
- Puzzle Ventures
The round also attracted star power from the angel investor community. Roy Reznik, co-founder of Wiz, participated alongside David Singleton, the former CTO of Stripe. Kieran Flanagan, the former CMO of Zapier, also invested. These individuals bring deep expertise in scaling tech products and understanding workflow automation.
Investors are clearly betting on the rise of “Agentic AI.” This refers to artificial intelligence that takes agency to perform multi-step workflows. While the last year was dominated by generative AI that creates text or images, the next wave is focused on AI that performs work.
How Duvo Powers the Digital Supply Chain
Duvo distinguishes itself by targeting business users rather than IT departments. The platform is low-code and intuitive. Commercial teams, supply chain managers and finance officers can deploy these assistants without writing a single line of code.
The platform comes pre-loaded with skills tailored for the retail environment.
Key capabilities available at launch include:
- Margin Protection: Running weekly reviews to ensure profitability targets are met across thousands of SKUs.
- Promotion Management: Automatically activating discounts and price changes across various sales channels.
- Supplier Reconciliation: Matching complex invoices from vendors against purchase orders to identify discrepancies.
- Assortment Optimization: Helping merchandisers decide which products to stock based on data trends.
Retailers who have adopted this technology report staggering results. Early users have seen a 40% reduction in manual operational work. This efficiency gain allows human teams to focus on strategy and customer experience rather than data hygiene.
The system is designed for rapid scalability. A retailer can start with a single team in one country to prove the value. Once the pilot succeeds, the same automation agents can be rolled out to other markets in weeks. This contrasts sharply with traditional IT rollouts that often take years to scale globally.
Moving Beyond Chatbots to Autonomous Action
Most people associate business AI with a chat interface where you ask a question and get an answer. Duvo is fundamentally different. It is built to run operations.
The AI agents work directly within the retailer’s existing software stack. They can access older web portals, legacy mainframe interfaces and modern SaaS tools simultaneously. If a task requires making a phone call to a vendor, the agent can handle that too.
This capability creates a seamless bridge between the old and the new.
Governance remains a top priority for enterprise clients. Duvo includes robust security controls to ensure the AI behaves as expected. Managers have full visibility into every action the agent takes.
The system operates on an exception basis.
This means the AI handles the standard workflow autonomously. It only stops to ask for human help when it encounters something unusual or high-risk. This “human-in-the-loop” model builds trust. It ensures that critical decisions still have oversight while automating the 90% of tasks that are routine.
The Future of Work in Retail
The injection of $15 million will allow Duvo to aggressively hire top talent and expand its product offerings. The company plans to deepen its penetration in the retail sector first. However, the founders have indicated plans to expand into other verticals that suffer from similar operational complexity.
This raises important questions about the future of retail employment. By automating boring and repetitive tasks, retailers can upgrade the quality of work for their staff. Employees can shift their focus to creative problem solving, vendor relationships and customer service.
We are witnessing the early stages of the “autonomous enterprise.” Companies that adopt these tools early will likely outperform their peers through speed and efficiency. Those that stick to manual spreadsheets risk falling behind as margins continue to tighten.
Duvo is not just selling software; they are selling time.
For a retail giant, saving 40% of the time spent on back-office operations translates to millions of dollars in savings and significantly faster speed to market. The backing from Index Ventures validates that this is not just a niche solution but a fundamental change in how business gets done.
The era of manual data entry in retail is coming to an end. The age of the digital worker has arrived.
