Now Clark is using that lifetime of experience, plus the lessons he learned from a brief, turbulent stint at supply chain startup Flexport, to bet on himself.

Clark this summer founded a new AI-powered supply chain startup called Auger and raised $100 million in Series A funding, entirely from investment firm Oak HC/FT, he said. Fortune in an interview on Monday. Clark’s goal is to help midsize companies with global supply chains—think the Fortune 500 outside the top 50—integrate different supply chain systems and their data from different suppliers into a single operating system that looks more like a consumer app than a clunky app. business solution.

“The software doesn’t really talk to each other; a friend of mine calls it Franken software,” Clark said of traditional supply chain systems. “The pieces all come together, but they don’t work together, and so people end up setting up teams of analysts using Excel. A shocking portion of the world’s supply chain actually runs on Excel.”

With Auger, Clark aims to give business users real-time answers to pressing questions about shipments, forecasting and other critical areas through simple text queries. Such visibility should help increase the efficiency of a supply chain while reducing costs, Clark believes.

“How do we ensure that companies can run their supply chains with the same level of simplicity and elegance as the consumer applications they use every day?” Clark asked rhetorically. “The technology fully exists to do that, and I think it just hasn’t been put together yet.”

Clark said the sweet spot for an Auger customer will be companies that have global supply chains but are not so large that they employ huge internal technology divisions. The startup will likely focus its efforts on US-based companies initially, but hopes to eventually expand further into government and defense as well.

Clark moved back to Washington state from Texas to launch Auger, headquartered in Bellevue. The startup wants to grow to 30 to 40 employees in the next six months, a spokesperson said. Auger hasn’t released a product yet, and Clark hasn’t decided which AI model or models the startup would use.

Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, retiring in 2022 as CEO of its global consumer business, reporting to Amazon CEO Bezos and later his successor Jassy. Clark spent nearly a decade of his time at Amazon in roles roughly equivalent to Chief Supply Chain Officer, where he launched and scaled Amazon’s last-mile delivery network and laid the foundation for a new regional warehouse structure that according to the company contributed to the increase in shipments. speeds.

Clark left Amazon for the CEO position at the freight software startup Flexport, partly due to friction with Jassy, ​​his new boss. But Clark spent only a year at the startup before Flexport founder Ryan Petersen pushed him and his deputies out in a dramatic, confusing move.

Clark, who said he has not spoken to Petersen or Jassy recently, is reportedly considering running for governor of Texas in 2026. But he told Fortune that he decided not to throw his hat in the ring after Gov. Greg Abbott announced earlier this year that he would run for re-election. “He’s a great governor,” Clark said of Abbott, although he noted that he hoped to eventually end up in politics, partly because of his disappointment with career politicians.

“Many of the problems we talk about today, whether it’s immigration or something else, are very solvable problems where rational people on both sides probably share 80% or 90% of the same objectives and don’t cross the line because it’s just too good. politics to make their careers fight,” he said. “I think if you have a world where politicians… that’s not their career… you have a better chance of solving some of these persistent problems that are lingering and causing a lot of dysfunction in the world.”

As for Auger, Clark said he had visions of tackling a similar problem at Flexport to what he is now at his own startup.

“I went to Flexport thinking we could build the same kind of things we did at Amazon, but for other companies,” says Clark. “And that was kind of the intention when I went there, but ultimately we didn’t align on the mission in the same way.”

Now he gets a second chance. With a war treasure of $100 million behind him.