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CognitOps Ready To Put $3M Seed Round To Work For Warehouse Managers

Warehouse management startup CognitOps is focusing on its go-to-market strategy with a new round of funding and a new executive to lead the charge.

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On Wednesday, the Austin-based company announced its $3 million seed round led by Chicago Ventures, with Schematic Ventures, CEAS Investments and Redwood Technologies also participating. Including the new funding, CognitOps has raised a total of $3.5 million since its inception in 2018, according to Crunchbase data.

CognitOps’ artificial intelligence-driven supply chain software focuses on improving warehouse management, collecting data from operations, and enabling machine-learning capabilities to turn all of that into recommendations and insight, CEO Alex Ramirez told Crunchbase News.

“We get a view of the entire warehouse and help all of the chess pieces be in line to go faster,” he added.

Ramirez said competitors present similar data in “fancy versions of Excel spreadsheets in a web browser,” which he believes is not operator-friendly. CognitOps’ software focuses on helping warehouse operations managers do their job by providing centralized data and quick analytics translated into plain-text recommendations, such as “move this person to this area.”

Many of the company’s new customers are having the CognitOps platform co-exist with one of their systems, he said. Warehouses typically have one system for management and one that controls the equipment, he added.

With 400,000 buildings in North America, the warehousing and storage industry is expected to reach $86 billion by 2024, according to ResearchandMarkets.com. CognitOps intends to go after the $3 billion part of the industry focused on warehouse management, Ramirez said.

The new funding will enable CognitOps to expand its product to support customer growth and accelerate go-to-market efforts to take advantage of the strong market demand, he said. As a result, Roger Counihan joined the company as chief revenue officer, a new position within CognitOps.

The company also plans to double its team of 11 by the end of the year, Ramirez said.

“Last year was about product market fit, and this year the focus is on revenue,” he added. “Roger is here to get us to $1 million in revenue. Even with COVID, we are seeing interest in retail–which we thought would be soft–as well as life sciences, third-party logistics, and nondurable manufacturing.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias

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