RetailTech firm Cogsy has raised £4.5 million in a seed round of funding.
The Bristol firm helps SME eCommerce merchants optimise operations with real-time, data-driven decisions via its supply chain management platform.
The round was led by Accel with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, WooCommerce (Automattic), Sugar Capital, and RiverPark Ventures. Angel investors including Casey Armstrong (CMO, ShipBob), Jay Myers (co-founder, Bold Commerce), Brian Long (co-founder and CEO, Attentive), Tomer Tagrin and Omri Cohen (co-founders, Yotpo) also participated in the round.
Cogsy says its platform allows brands to automatically forecast sales, create recommended purchase orders in one click, visualise purchasing patterns and turn out-of-stock products into revenue by facilitating backorder purchases while keeping the customer in the loop on expected shipping dates.
It also helps teams across an organisation align on priorities where operations are a key consideration: for example, if marketing wants to run a campaign on a product, the ops team will need to forecast inventory, purchases, and replenishment times.
Cogsy was founded by Adii Pienaar (CEO, pictured) and Stefano Sala (CTO) in 2021, both veterans of the eCommerce enablement space. Pienaar previously co-founded eCommerce website builder WooCommerce, which was subsequently acquired by Automatti, and eCommerce marketing automation platform Conversio, acquired by CampaignMonitor.
Sala was the founding engineer at Conversio, scaling the engineering team as CTO.
“My passion and ambition has always been to build tools that help businesses – especially SMEs – grow and excel,” said Pienaar. “After having skin in the game for years in eCommerce, I saw first-hand how operational data was underused as a strategic inter-organisational resource.
“For many retail brands, this data is often confined to clunky spreadsheets and analysing it in real-time is impossible given how manual and time-consuming it is. Cogsy was inspired by these challenges, to help modern retail brands efficiently organise their operational data with actionable insights, and quickly make decisions which drive commercial value for the whole business.”
Seth Pierrepont, partner at Accel, said: “Few sectors have evolved as fast as eCommerce in recent years. Retail brands are taking advantage of this new landscape and orienting themselves around a digital-first approach.
“Yet when it comes to their ops functions, many are still using yesterday’s playbook. Cogsy is helping brands turn their ops function into engines of growth. When it comes to eCommerce enablement, you would be hard pressed to find a founder more committed and experienced than Adii.”
Mark Riskowitz, head of operations at Caraway, a DTC cookware business and Cogsy customer, commented: “In a few clicks, we have complete visibility and powerful analytics to make real-time decisions, all while avoiding the need for additional headcount.”