Intropy raises $11m to let AI set spare parts prices and stock

On 31 July, Intropy, a London company that sells AI software to spare parts businesses, said it had raised $11m (£8.2m) in a seed round led by Felix Capital. Quiet Capital joined, alongside General Catalyst and firstminute capital, which had both backed the company before. As reported by Tech.eu, General Catalyst led an earlier pre-seed round of an undisclosed size. Intropy said the money will pay for product development, more engineering and machine learning staff, and a New York office.

The company was set up by Franziska Kirschner, co-founder and chief executive, and YihKai Teh, co-founder and CTO. Kirschner is a physicist trained at the University of Oxford whose research was published in Nature; Teh is an AI academic from University College London. Both worked at Tractable, an AI insurance-technology company, where, according to Intropy, they “developed a deep appreciation for the spare parts industry” and were named as inventors on more than 10 patents applying AI to it. Companies House shows Intropy AI Ltd was incorporated on 11 December 2023, with both founders as directors. The company gives its founding year as 2024.

Its customers are distributors, manufacturers and recyclers of spare parts. Intropy said deciding how much stock to hold, where to place it, when to change a price and which inventory is becoming obsolete often means teams reviewing hundreds of thousands of individual SKUs by hand, using information spread across ERP systems, warehouse platforms, spreadsheets, documents and phone calls.

The round is a bet that those businesses will let software act on price and stock, rather than only advise on it. That is a larger request of a parts distributor than a forecasting report, and the announcement backs it with the company’s own figures but no named customer.

Decisions written into the ERP

Intropy’s product pulls structured and unstructured data from a customer’s existing systems and, the company said, automates decisions “directly within a customer’s existing operations in an ERP rather than simply presenting recommendations for employees to review”. In practice that means adjusting inventory levels and prices and managing obsolescence continuously, instead of in periodic reviews. In June its homepage offered modules to optimize prices, reduce obsolescence, optimize distribution and auto-populate ERP records.

Kirschner set out the pitch in the announcement: “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.” Teh went further: “The best user experience is when the user needs to do nothing at all.”

A part that stops selling ties up cash on the shelf until it is sold off or scrapped; a part that runs out loses the sale. Intropy said stock and pricing decisions are getting harder as parts businesses deal with tariffs, rising fuel and operating costs, uncertain repair volumes and more complex vehicles and machines. It puts the scale of the market at more than $4bn in automotive spare parts transacted every day, an estimate the release does not source.

Large figures and no customer names

The traction figures are Intropy’s own. The company said its technology has processed more than $10bn in parts demand since launch and that customers have achieved returns on investment of more than 10x. It did not say how the return is measured, over what period or for how many customers. The same release describes the $10bn as “parts demand” in one paragraph and “parts sales” in another. It said the platform has supported parts operations in the US and Europe, but names no customer, and its homepage listed none in June.

A creative-class investor in the parts trade

Felix Capital, based in London, describes itself on its website as “a venture capital firm for the Creative Class”, and its homepage is organized around new ways of living and working. Spare parts sit some way from that. Fabian Burnett Small, an investor at the firm, said Felix believes “AI will fundamentally transform product design, and how the physical economy operates”, and that the firm was impressed by the founders’ “technical depth, domain expertise and ambition”.

Felix Capital and Quiet Capital are new to the company’s backers, and New York is the one new office named in the plans, alongside continued expansion in Europe. Intropy said it is hiring engineers and AI researchers in London and New York.

Intropy goes into its New York expansion with $11m, two founders named on more than 10 patents applying AI to the parts trade, and a product built to take decisions away from parts buyers and pricing teams. What the round does not yet show is a named parts business that has handed those decisions over.