While much of the software industry spent the spring bracing for frontier AI models to swallow enterprise applications whole, Dave Clark was busy raising money for exactly the kind of enterprise software those models are supposed to make obsolete. This week, his supply chain startup Auger closed a $50 million Series B led by Eclipse, with existing backer Oak HC/FT re-upping — a round that signals investors are, if anything, doubling down on the Bellevue, Wash., company's bet that running a supply chain is too specialized for general-purpose AI to touch.
The new capital brings Auger's total funding to $150 million and lands as the company, founded in 2024, has quietly assembled a customer roster that includes Meta's virtual and augmented reality division, sports-merchandise giant Fanatics, and consumer-products maker Kimberly-Clark.
What Auger actually does
Auger is not a chatbot bolted onto logistics. The company sits on top of a customer's existing systems — ERP, warehouse management, transportation management, and demand planning — and unifies that data into a single operating layer. Rather than replacing those systems, it connects them, using AI agents alongside traditional optimization models to make operational decisions and execute them automatically wherever possible.
The core of the pitch is what Auger calls its ontology: a detailed map of how supply chains actually function, built on deep domain expertise. Clark, the company's CEO, argues that this is the moat general-purpose models can't easily cross.
"Many a pure technology company died on the hill of supply chain over the last decade," Clark said in an interview describing the round. "You really need to understand the complexity and the contextual requirements."
Where most supply chain software generates alerts and waits for a human to respond, Auger is designed to make routine decisions on its own and escalate only the exceptions. In a demonstration at the company's Bellevue office, Clark showed the system handling a supplier missing a delivery commitment: Auger identifies the shortfall, decides which customers get priority, reallocates inventory, and pushes the updated plan back into the company's existing tools.
"We're not really a tool," Clark said. "We're really the new employee."
That framing is showing up in usage. At Fanatics, Clark said, roughly 85% of the decisions in the process Auger manages now happen autonomously, with a near-term goal of reaching the mid-90s. Beyond its named customers, he said another eight to 10 companies are in contract negotiations or pilot programs.
The team and the money
Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, rising to lead its worldwide operations and later its worldwide consumer business, before leaving in 2022. A brief, turbulent stint as CEO of freight-forwarding startup Flexport lasted less than a year. He launched Auger in 2024, moving back to the Seattle area to tap the region's talent pool, and raised a $100 million Series A from Oak HC/FT. Co-founder Leigh Anne Clark, his wife, serves as president of the company's fashion and beauty division — an industry Clark calls one of the most wasteful supply chains outside groceries.
The company has grown to about 130 employees and built a C-suite drawn heavily from Amazon's senior ranks, plus leaders from Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Salesforce. With the Series B, Eclipse partner Jiten Behl joins Auger's board, which also includes Clark, president and CFO Alex Ceballos, and Oak HC/FT's Matt Streisfeld.
Auger hasn't disclosed revenue, but Clark said the new valuation is roughly double the level set by the Series A — and that the company deliberately avoided chasing a headline-grabbing number.
"We didn't shoot for the crazy astronomical valuation," he said. "We sat at a place that we felt really comfortable with."
Clark said Auger went out for the round early, before it needed the cash, to avoid fundraising distraction during what he expects to be a busy fall of customer onboarding.
A note on the numbers
Some coverage has framed this $50 million as a follow-on to a separate, larger Series B. Based on the primary reporting available at publication — including a detailed account from GeekWire's Todd Bishop — the verifiable picture is narrower: a single $50 million Series B led by Eclipse, bringing total funding to $150 million on top of the 2024 Series A. The Vault could not independently confirm a separate $200 million round and treats that figure as unverified.
The funding climate
The round is a useful counterpoint to the prevailing 2026 venture narrative. Industry data cited this month shows U.S. venture investment hit a record $412.7 billion in the first half of the year — but more than 80% of those dollars flowed into mega-rounds of $100 million or more, and a handful of megafunds captured the bulk of new fundraising. Capital is abundant for conviction bets and scarce for interchangeable software.
Investors have grown wary of "AI wrappers" that add a thin layer on top of foundation models. What's getting funded instead are companies that own a hard constraint — proprietary data, physical deployment, or a high-stakes workflow that's painful to rip out. Auger's supply chain ontology and its embed-and-execute model fit that thesis, helping explain why Eclipse and returning investor Oak HC/FT wrote checks at double the prior valuation for a company still very young in venture terms.
What to watch
Clark's ambitions are not modest: he says Auger's goal is to have half of U.S. GDP flowing through its platform by 2030, with revenue exceeding $1 billion.
"That requires a pretty steep curve to get there," he said. "We're not playing small."
The tests ahead are concrete. Can Auger convert its eight-to-10 pipeline of pilots into paying, autonomous deployments? Can its March partnership as a premier supply chain partner on Microsoft Fabric — with its product built on Azure and Microsoft reps earning commission on deals — turn early engagement into real distribution? And can autonomy rates like Fanatics' 85% hold up across messier, less-optimized enterprises? For now, investors seem convinced the answer is yes.
"We're not really a tool. We're really the new employee."— Dave Clark, Co-founder and CEO, Auger