Dave Clark has had a roller coaster ride over the past two years.

After stepping down as CEO of Amazon’s global consumer division in June 2022 – a role he held for more than two decades – Clark moved to Dallas to join supply chain logistics company Flexport. With a directorship to prepare Flexport for an IPO, Clark led as co-CEO and later as CEO, while founder Ryan Peterson transitioned to executive chairman.

But it didn’t all go smoothly. In September 2023, Flexport’s board, led by Peterson, pressured Clark to resign, accusing him of mismanagement. Clark insisted he was only trying to solve what he considered “extensive” organizational problems. Later reporting supported Clark’s claims, but the damage had already been done. Clark was gone.

Clark considered a governorship in Texas; he also hired strategists. But the appeal of starting a business – one he could run as he saw fit – proved stronger.

Clark unveiled his new company, Auger, on Tuesday, and he has raised a massive $100 million seed round led by venture capital firm Oak HC/FT. Auger is developing an AI-powered tool for supply chain-dependent businesses that integrates with existing inventory management platforms to deliver real-time insights.

“Throughout my career, I have seen firsthand how broken supply chains impact not just companies, but actually millions of people: delays that prevent products from reaching shelves, miscommunication that forces workers into overtime, higher consumer prices, and inefficiencies that contributing to a growing environmental footprint,” Clark told TechCrunch. “These are not just business issues; they are human problems. And it’s time we fix them.”

Clark was vague about what precisely Auger is building, except it’s “unifying” supply chain data across different types of aggregation. There also appears to be a chatbot component: Clark says users can “simply” ask questions like “Give me inventory information for next week’s shipment,” and Auger will “immediately” offer that data at a “consumer level.” portal.

“Despite heavy investment, companies still rely on fragmented ‘Franken software’ – disjointed systems patched together by incompatible technologies that do not communicate effectively,” said Clark. “This leads to inefficient solutions and forces critical decisions to be made using tools like Excel, which were never designed to handle the complexity of supply chains at this scale. Auger creates a new solution for companies looking for better options.”

According to Clark, there is a high demand for technology that helps organizations gain insight into their supply chains. According to one source, 56% of retailers are holding “safety stock” for weeks as insurance against setbacks in supply chain visibility.

The lack of supply chain awareness – combined with mounting supply chain headwinds, from dock worker strikes to unrest in the Red Sea – is contributing to major global shipping disruptions. According to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about a third of service companies and nearly half of manufacturers are having trouble obtaining inventory.

“Increasing disruptions and global conflicts are driving near-constant changes in global production and the flow of goods, pushing existing technology beyond its limits,” Clark said.

The more recent obstacles, combined with the challenges posed by the pandemic, have led to an explosion in the number of startups focused on supply chain visibility and management. The logistics software industry is on track to reach $46.5 billion by 2025, by market and by market. And funding is flowing healthily to early-stage supply chain platform providers – startups in the sector received $15.4 billion in investment this year.

Indeed, Auger, based in Bellevue, Washington, is entering a market chock full of formidable rivals.

Altana, which secured $200 million from investors in July, uses an AI system to create a shared view of international supply chain networks, based on both logistics and B2B data. Everstream and Pando offer their own dashboards for analytics, intended to complement transportation management and supplier relationship management systems.

Clark claims that what Auger will create will be truly different.

“Auger will integrate data from multiple sources and use advanced AI and machine learning to generate automated, dynamic insights in real time,” said Clark. “The platform provides a single view for planning, forecasting and financing (to) … enable teams to move beyond manual tasks and focus on driving innovation.”

Clark may just have what it takes to take on the bigger vendors in the SaaS supply chain software space. Logistics is his specialty after all. At Amazon, Clark was one of the early advocates of robotic automation, which saved the company tens of millions of dollars. And during the pandemic, Clark dramatically expanded Amazon’s operations to meet increased demand for online goods.

Clark, on the other hand, has made major management mistakes. He misjudged the receipt of Amazon’s brick-and-mortar businesses and overexpanded the company’s warehouse capacity during the latter part of the pandemic. The latter decision led to billions in cost overruns.

Matt Streisfeld, general partner of Oak, has confidence in Clark, calling him a “once-in-a-lifetime” founder with the potential to “reinvent supply chain management software.”

“We are in the midst of a critical shift, with more data moving to the cloud every day,” Streisfeld said in a statement. “With this shift, we will have more accessible information that can be structured for not only real-time, continuous planning, but also so that AI can be layered to automate more workflows and provide more business and financial insights for inventory management and forecasting. .”

Clark says Auger, which has yet to acquire customers or generate revenue, will release more information about its product roadmap and milestones in the coming months. “Our founding team consists of ruthless problem solvers with a proven track record of delivering transformative supply chain solutions at scale,” he added. “This is just the beginning.”