BMW is continuing its strategic investments in key companies, started a few years back, under the BMW i Ventures umbrella. This week, the German company announced a new investment during the Series A financing of Verusen, a company that is aiming to use Artificial Intelligence to drop down the costs and increase the efficiency of supply chains. According to BMW i Ventures and Verusen, the funds will be used to support the further expansion of the latter.
Verusen is a rather new name in the business but it caused some serious waves when it managed to grow seven-fold in 2020. For 2021, they are apparently aiming to expand further and scale the technology used right now to more than 25 countries. It’s important to note that BMW i Ventures wasn’t the only company investing at this point, being joined by Glasswing Ventures, Zetta Venture Partners, Kubera and Engage.
“Verusen’s inventory optimization software has proven to save companies tens of millions of dollars in capex costs wasted on poor inventory management each year,” said Kasper Sage, Partner at BMW i Ventures. “There is significant room for improvement for optimizing across the supply chain in the automotive industry, where the number of parts in a single car can be in the tens of thousands. Verusen’s AI-driven approach for inventory optimization brings companies that must handle significant inventory loads one step closer to realizing the ultimate vision of the connected supply chain.”
So what does Verusen actually offer? The company’s tech solves the shortcoming of existing inventory optimization with a data-centric approach that combines AI-based data cleansing and predictive models for inventory optimization. According to Atlanta-based company, their solution reduces costs by millions of dollars in capex savings for the customers. Additionally, as Verusen’s system is a one-stop solution for both data cleansing and inventory planning, customers have the added advantage of significantly lower cost than traditional solutions and faster time to rollout.
