Franziska Kirschner

Franziska Kirschner co-founded Intropy in London in 2024 with YihKai Teh and is its chief executive. The company’s legal entity, Intropy AI Ltd, was incorporated in December 2023, according to Companies House. Kirschner is an Oxford-trained physicist; Teh is an AI academic from University College London. The two worked together at Tractable, the London AI company, where they became inventors on more than 10 patents applying AI to the parts sector.

Decisions, not dashboards

Intropy sells software to spare-parts distributors, manufacturers and recyclers. It pulls together structured and unstructured information and connects to a customer’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and warehouse systems, then makes decisions on stock levels, where to hold parts, pricing and obsolescence automatically, rather than presenting recommendations for staff to review. For vehicle recyclers it also prices lots, lists parts and manages bins.

Kirschner is direct about the approach. “We are not interested in adding another dashboard on top of that complexity,” she said in July. The company says its technology has processed more than $10bn (£7.5bn) of parts demand and that customers have achieved returns on investment of more than 10x. It supports parts operations in the US, UK and Europe.

A seed round and a New York office

In July 2026 Intropy announced an $11m (£8.2m) seed round led by Felix Capital, with Quiet Capital and earlier backers General Catalyst and firstminute capital. The money is for product development, more engineering and machine learning hires, and a New York office to grow its US business, while it continues to expand across Europe.

Why it matters to UK buyers

Parts businesses are dealing with tariffs, rising fuel and operating costs, uncertain repair volumes and more complex vehicles and machines, Intropy argues, which makes decisions on what to stock and how to price it harder to get right. For UK distributors and manufacturers, software that acts inside the existing ERP rather than replacing it may be an easier change to make. For ERP resellers and consultancies serving industrial customers, an AI layer that writes decisions back into the systems they already support is a likely add-on rather than a threat.

Kirschner has taken a narrow, unglamorous problem and built a business around automating it from end to end. An $11m seed round and a New York office show investors think the spare-parts market is big enough to support it.