The New York-based startup says the platform places intelligent software assistants across daily operations, including sales, purchasing, inventory and finance. Its goal is to remove the manual work still used in food distribution.

Investors such as a16z Speedrun, Anterra Capital, Offline Ventures and Long Journey Ventures supported Anchr in the seed funding round. Executives from OpenAI also joined the investment.

Food distribution sits behind everyday commerce. Every restaurant order, supermarket shelf and catering delivery depends on it. However, much of the industry still runs on text messages, spreadsheets and ageing software.

Distributors handle hundreds of billions of dollars in perishable goods each year. Despite that scale, many teams still manage key processes manually.

Orders are typed into systems by hand, purchasing decisions rely on scattered spreadsheets and finance teams usually reconcile invoices across several disconnected platforms.

Anchr believes that gap creates an opportunity.

Most distributors rely on enterprise resource planning systems built to record past activity. Those systems log transactions but rarely guide future decisions. They do not forecast demand, optimise inventory in real time or warn teams about shrinking margins.

Other platforms focus mainly on digital ordering. For example, Choco and Pepper help customers place orders online. However, they stop there. Purchasing, reconciliation and margin analysis are still outside their scope.

As a result, many distributors use a patchwork of tools. Instead of simplifying operations, that mix often adds complexity.

Anchr’s platform sits on top of existing systems. Rather than replacing ERP software, it connects to it. The company says the software then handles tasks across order intake, purchasing, inventory planning, invoicing and collections.

Work that once required hours of manual input can now run automatically, with information carried across each step.

“The biggest opportunity to leverage AI isn’t in industries with modern infrastructure,” said Tzar Taraporvala, co-founder and Co-CEO of Anchr. “It’s buried deep in the operational backbone of the economy. Food distributors manage millions of dollars of inventory with systems that were never designed to handle today’s complexity.

“We built Anchr to become the intelligent layer that works alongside teams every single day, automating away the tedious, unsexy parts of the job to create truly material value for a margin-strapped business.”

The founders know the problem well, as Taraporvala and Smayan Mehra have built companies together for more than twenty years. Their interest in supply chain systems grew after seeing how disconnected many of them are.

A breakthrough came when they worked with a seafood distributor in Boston. The team spent months studying operations on the factory floor. What they found was unforgettable.

Staff entered orders into ERP systems at three in the morning, purchasing decisions came from fragmented spreadsheets and finance teams balanced invoices across several platforms.

For the founders, the inefficiencies were apparent and expensive.

Early users of the platform are already reporting measurable changes. One distributor recovered about 40% of daily working time across eight sales representatives. The profit came after automating order intake from text messages and emails.

Another company cut aged inventory losses by $30,000 in a single month. Better purchasing decisions, guided by live demand signals, helped achieve that.

Elsewhere, a customer expects to increase average basket size by roughly $65 per order. The system analyses menus and catalogues to suggest additional products.

In an industry where profit margins usually sit in low single digits, even small improvements can add up quickly.

The company’s early growth shows that urgency. Within 12 weeks of joining Speedrun, Anchr says it had already booked seven-figure revenue. Its customer base now ranges from regional distributors to a publicly traded company valued at about $5 billion.

“If the first era of enterprise software digitised record-keeping, we believe the next era will automate it. We call that shift Enterprise Resource Automation (ERA) – and Anchr is building this inevitable operating layer” said Smayan Mehra, co-founder and Co-CEO, Anchr.

With the seed funding, Anchr plans to expand automation across every layer of distributor operations. The aim is to create a system that supports every decision affecting product movement or financial flow.

Beyond food distribution, the founders see similar opportunities in other supply chains where physical goods move through fragmented systems.

“The magic here is compounding: when sales, purchasing, inventory, and finance share context, the whole business runs differently. Anchr is building an AI-native operating layer that turns fragmented steps into an integrated workflow and the early customer outcomes show what that unlocks,” said Troy Kirwin at a16z Speedrun.

The company, co-founded by Elias Malm and Mo Elkhidir, is developing multi-agent AI systems capable of running entire marketing operations, from campaign setup to optimisation and reporting. 

The seed round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional backing from EWOR, Entourage, and several high-profile angels, including the former CMO of Booking.com.

In only twelve weeks since its creation, Epiminds has already attracted top agencies managing more than 240 brands to its platform. The startup aims to tackle the inefficiencies affecting agencies today, slow decision-making, fragmented insights, and limited scalability, by introducing a self-learning AI workforce.

At the core of Epiminds’ technology is Lucy, an AI marketing manager designed to lead a team of over 20 specialised agents. This digital team handles all aspects of campaign management, including reporting, bidding, budget pacing, creative analysis, and more. 

Agencies can onboard clients in under 30 seconds and immediately gain access to a ready-made marketing team powered by AI.

“Marketers are under more pressure than ever to do more with less,” said Mo Elkhidir, co-founder of Epiminds. “Lucy and her team take on the busywork so that marketing talent can do their best work. This is not about replacing creativity; it’s about giving it room to flourish.”

The idea for Epiminds was born out of the founders’ frustrations with inefficiencies in modern marketing. Malm, who previously worked at Google overseeing agency partnerships across the Nordics, saw creative teams stuck in repetitive operational work. 

Elkhidir, a Sudanese-born machine learning expert who led technical teams at Spotify and Kry, had long explored how AI agents could collaborate to solve complex tasks. 

Their vision came together after a project simulating Sweden’s 10.8 million citizens in AI, where they identified 23,400 simulated marketers, inspiring the concept of AI-powered marketing teams.

Early adopters are already seeing results. Agencies report quicker onboarding, improved performance, and reduced ad spend wastage. The system not only executes tasks but also learns from each agency’s operations, proactively detecting risks and providing actionable insights.

John Axelsson, founder and CEO of BBO, shared: “We’ve integrated EpiMinds into our advertising workflows. It has really started transforming how our specialists work by automating analysis and surfacing deep actionable insights, while we remain in control of strategic decisions. The result is faster optimisation, more effective collaboration between human expertise and AI, and ultimately better outcomes for our clients.”

Jenny Dettervik, media lead at Remotion, added: “EpiMinds has become a valuable part of our workflow. By automating parts of our agency’s know-how through AI agents, we can get insights faster, optimise more efficiently, and deliver higher quality to our clients.”

Lightspeed Partner Paul Murphy explained the firm’s investment rationale, saying: “As a former founder who relied heavily on performance marketing, I saw firsthand how difficult it is to scale campaigns across dozens of channels and geographies. 

“Epiminds’ multi-agent approach directly tackles that challenge, transforming the way agencies and brands operate. It’s rare to see a team build something this ambitious, and we believe Epiminds has the potential to redefine how marketing gets done in the AI era.”

Since joining EWOR’s accelerator programme, Epiminds has achieved commendable traction. Daniel Dippold, co-founder and CEO of EWOR, said: “Elias and Mo are the rare kind of founders that have what it takes to take a company from 0-1M ARR, from 1-100M, and from 100-infinity. They have both hustle and leadership, both speed and perfection, and both aggression and empathy. On both a rational and irrational level, I think and feel they will go far.”

Pieterjan Bouten, partner at Entourage, added: “Elias and Mo embody the urgency and operational excellence we look for in founders building in the AI era. A massive wave of innovation is reshaping how leading marketing agencies operate, and Epiminds is poised to be at the forefront of that transformation. We’re thrilled to back these two exceptional founders early as they pursue this massive opportunity.”

The company plans to expand Lucy’s features through increased integrations, improved autonomy, and advanced self-learning features. Each upgrade is designed to make the platform smarter and more efficient across all connected agencies.

“Our vision is simple,” said Elias Malm. “We’re building Epiminds because we see where marketing is headed. The future is about dynamic, agentic teams that analyse, plan, execute, and improve in real time. Every marketer should have access to a 24/7 AI workforce that frees up their time for creativity and strategy. Our goal is to give them that future, today.”

Slug: Epiminds Launches with $6.6 Million to Power AI Marketing Teams
Meta Description: Swedish startup Epiminds, founded by ex-Google and Spotify professionals, launches with $6.6 million to build AI-driven marketing teams led by multi-agent system Lucy.

The funding will be used to drive the development of Bardeen’s AI agents, which automate repetitive tasks using natural language commands.

The new investment brings the company’s total funding to date to $22 million and will be used to further Bardeen’s vision for a fully autonomous AI that builds time-saving automation for its users.

Nearly all forms of work now have specialised apps, as demonstrated by enterprise app usage increasing 24% since 2016 and larger companies deploying more than 187 apps on average. 

When used individually, these apps can be invaluable, however, more often workers must use dozens of different apps concurrently, which leads to precious hours spent clicking windows, navigating menus and copy-pasting across countless tabs. 

Existing automation tools and continued AI advancements promise to solve the headache of working across disparate apps, yet most solutions require extensive resources to implement and deliver few tangible productivity improvements.

Bardeen offers an AI agent platform that’s purpose-built for workers using enterprise apps every day, not IT departments with deep technical knowledge.

The company prioritises usability and pragmatism, combining AI with traditional automation techniques to seamlessly handle repetitive tasks such as copy-pasting, conducting web research and sending emails.

In the last six months, Bardeen surpassed 300,000 users and more than 1,000 paying customers, which includes high-growth startups and enterprises like Deel, Miro, Kearney, WPP and 10Web, among others.

In addition to providing strategic funding, Dropbox and HubSpot are supportive partners in Bardeen’s go-to-market strategy, helping to reach new customers through their respective channels.

“The pressure to be productive has never been higher, and yet workers are drowning in endless sources of information and AI tools that bring confusion and stress, rather than results,” said Pascal Weinberger, co-founder and CEO of Bardeen.

“We provide workers with a clear starting point and roadmap for their essential, daily tasks, and automate those tasks with user-friendly, results-driven AI agents. Our customer growth and backing from the biggest innovators in SaaS productivity like HubSpot and Dropbox are a testament to Bardeen’s positive impact on teams, employees, and freelancers across the globe.”

Bardeen recently introduced significant updates to its AI agent platform, which runs as a browser extension and is context-aware. Most notably, in Bardeen 3.0, AI agents conduct a “planning” step after receiving instructions from the user, something that dramatically increases reliability and accuracy compared to competing tools.

Built to support thousands of concurrent automation, Bardeen 3.0 includes:                                                                   

• Enterprise-grade encryption and compliance, including the option to run high-volume workflows in the cloud
• A natural language interface that makes building powerful AI automation easy and accessible for all
• Proactive suggestions via an automation assistant that continually learns from usage patterns
• 100 additional integrations with tools like Microsoft 365, most CRMs, and sales outreach and enrichment tools
• The ability to share best practices and standardise automated workflows to improve productivity across an entire organisation

“At Deel, speed and responsiveness are core to our culture, and by leveraging Bardeen to automate repetitive workflows, our Sales and Operations teams can do more in less time to help serve our customers better,” said Alex Bouaziz, co-founder and CEO of Deel.

“It’s been an absolute game-changer to roll out Bardeen’s AI automation across our organisation.”                                                                                          

Bardeen is most commonly used by sales teams, creative agencies, recruiters, freelancers and executives at fast-growing companies. The company has grown to more than 30 employees and is actively hiring in multiple roles.