Duvo.ai has secured $15 million in seed funding to expand its AI-native automation platform that enables retail teams to automate operations across legacy systems, portals, and modern tools. The investment was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Credo Ventures, Northzone, and Puzzle Ventures, and several angel investors including Roy Reznik (co-founder of Wiz), David Singleton (former CTO of Stripe), Ajay Kavan (long time Amazon veteran), and Kieran Flanagan (former CMO of Zapier).
Industry-specific approach to AI automation
The company targets a persistent inefficiency in retail and consumer goods sectors, where staff often spend significant time manually transferring data between disparate systems. „Across the industry, millions of hours of bottom-up, exception-heavy work remain untouched because traditional IT automation takes years and cannot handle the messy reality of retail systems,” explains Tomas Čupr, Duvo’s CEO and co-founder, who previously founded European grocery unicorn Rohlik.
Duvo’s platform enables business users to create AI assistants using natural language instructions. These assistants then execute tasks across various systems including SAP, supplier portals, email, and spreadsheets. The company claims early deployments have achieved approximately 40% reduction in manual work across core retail processes, though these figures have not been independently verified.
One of their most important pitches is that Duvo’s technology is built specifically for retail operations. The platform includes governance features, audit trails, security protocols, and user management systems. It ships with pre-built AI assistants for common retail tasks such as margin reviews, promotion activation, supplier invoice reconciliation, and vendor onboarding.
AI-native automation platform built for business users, not IT
Duvo’s founding team brings substantial retail operations experience. Besides Čupr, the company’s leadership includes Marek Paris as CPTO and Martin Pecha as COO, both former Rohlik executives. This industry background appears central to their approach.
„Many AI companies are building horizontal tools and hoping to find vertical use cases,” notes Jan Hammer, partner at Index Ventures. „Duvo is doing the opposite – building specifically for the retail sector, drawing on their decades of experience in this highly complex and technologically underserved industry.”
The platform is designed to be accessible to non-technical staff.
„Commercial, supply chain and finance teams can create and improve assistants themselves, without waiting for large IT projects or specialist engineering support,” the company states. This approach contrasts with traditional enterprise software projects that often require significant IT resources and can take months or years to implement.
According to Duvo, retailers typically begin with one team or country, demonstrate value within weeks, and then expand the same automations to other markets without extensive IT projects. The company currently serves multi-billion-dollar retail and FMCG groups with six-figure annual contracts that are reportedly expanding.
Funding plans and market position
The $15 million investment will support Duvo’s hiring efforts and product expansion as it scales across the retail sector. The company currently employs 15 people and plans to grow its team across product, engineering, and go-to-market functions.
Beyond retail, Duvo aims to eventually expand into other verticals „where operational complexity demands resilient automation.”
In a LinkedIn post announcing the funding, the company positioned its technology as particularly relevant to retail’s current economic challenges: „The next decade in retail will be defined by cost transformation: retailers who truly rewire their cost base with AI – while elevating their people to higher-value work – will be structurally cheaper, and in retail, structurally cheaper usually wins.”
As competition intensifies in the AI automation space, Duvo’s industry-specific approach represents an alternative to general-purpose AI assistants. Whether its retail focus provides sufficient advantage against larger, better-funded competitors remains to be seen as the company deploys its new capital.
