Supply chain startup Intropy raises £8m led by Felix Capital with Quiet Capital
This article covers Intropy, a supply chain startup, which has raised £8m in a seed funding round to automate spare-parts decisions that often rely on spreadsheets and manual review. The funding is intended to support product development and hiring as the startup embeds automated inventory, pricing and obsolescence decision-making inside customers' ERPs, targeting spare-parts businesses and supply-chain teams in Europe and the United States.
Intropy, a supply chain startup, has raised £8 million in a seed funding round to automate spare-parts decisions that today often depend on spreadsheets and manual review. The funding will be used to accelerate product development, hire engineering and machine learning staff in London and New York, and open a New York office as the company scales into the United States and across Europe.
Why it matters
Spare parts are a low-visibility but high-volume part of the physical economy. In the automotive sector alone, more than $4 billion in spare parts are estimated to be transacted every day, yet many businesses still run on software designed decades ago. That creates repeated manual effort: teams review hundreds of thousands of SKUs to decide stock levels, pricing and obsolescence.
Intropy’s seed round is notable because it targets that operational friction with a focus on execution: rather than presenting recommendations for humans to action, the startup automates decisions directly inside a customer’s existing ERP. If it works at scale, customers could shift from periodic, reactive reviews to continuous, market-driven updates that alter inventory placement, pricing and obsolescence handling in near real time.
Inside the product
Intropy aggregates structured and unstructured information across ERPs, warehouse platforms, spreadsheets, images, documents and even phone conversations. Its system then executes decisions inside the customer’s ERP rather than surfacing them as standalone recommendations.
Since launching, Intropy says it has processed more than $10 billion in parts demand and that customers have achieved returns on investment of more than 10x. The product promises dynamic inventory and pricing adjustments and continuous obsolescence management, moving parts businesses away from batch processes toward ongoing optimisation.
Founded in 2024 by Franziska Kirschner and YihKai Teh, the company builds on the founders’ AI and research backgrounds. Kirschner trained in physics at the University of Oxford and has published in Nature; Teh is an AI academic from University College London. The pair previously worked together at Tractable and are named inventors on more than ten patents applying AI to the sector.
Who are the investors?
The £8 million seed round was led by Felix Capital and includes participation from Quiet Capital alongside earlier backers General Catalyst and firstminute capital. Intropy says the funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand engineering and machine learning teams, and to establish a New York office while continuing its European growth. Engineers and AI researchers are being hired in London and New York.
In the announcement, Fabian Burnett Small, Investor at Felix Capital, said:
At Felix, we believe AI will fundamentally transform product design, and how the physical economy operates. Intropy is building the intelligence layer that can make supply chains faster, smarter and significantly more efficient, ultimately bringing a better product faster in the hands of the end user. We were immediately impressed by Fran and YihKai's technical depth, domain expertise and ambition, and are excited to support them in building a new intelligence layer for the physical world.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of supply chain venture capital firms in the UK
- Browse our directory of supply chain angel investors in the UK
Founder perspective
In the announcement, Franziska Kirschner, Co-founder & CEO at Intropy, said:
The physical economy is sustained not only by what we build, but by our ability to keep it working. Spare parts make that possible, yet many of the industry's most important decisions still rely on fragmented systems and manual work. We are not interested in adding another dashboard on top of that complexity. We are building an AI-native operating system that can make and execute decisions autonomously, at scale and speed. The future is here, and we are ready to serve an industry that technology has overlooked for far too long.
In the announcement, YihKai Teh, Co-founder & CTO at Intropy, said:
Every machine made from multiple components will eventually need spare parts, whether it is a car on the road today, an autonomous vehicle of tomorrow or a robot supporting humanity on Mars. We're building the intelligence layer that understands the extraordinary complexity of spare parts: what fits, how it performs and when it is needed, so parts businesses can make better decisions. Our goal is to make that complexity invisible, with intelligence working quietly in the background. The best user experience is when the user needs to do nothing at all.
The bigger picture
The deal illustrates continued investor interest in applying AI to the physical economy—areas that have attracted less attention than consumer software but where operational gains can be substantial. For UK supply chain startups, the move also highlights a familiar playbook: product-market fit in Europe followed by a push into the United States, backed by venture capital.
As Intropy hires in London and opens an office in New York, the round underlines how UK-founded AI teams are positioning themselves to address global industrial problems. If the company delivers on its claims, customers operating complex parts businesses could see meaningful reductions in waste and cost—and that would be a tangible win for wider efforts to modernise industrial supply chains across Europe and beyond.
They've invested in Intropy
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