Serena Williams leads seed funding round for supply chain management startup

Calico, developer of an AI-powered smart supply chain management platform, has raised $2 million in seed funding. The growth financing is led by Serena Ventures.

Through its end-to-end operating system, Calico aims to provide brands with a single source of truth for their product development, merchandising, and purchasing functions. Coupled with Calico’s platform, is a manufacturing network that enables brands to stand up new product lines quickly. According to the startup, brands using Calico have successfully reduced expensive production errors, accelerated time to market by 25%, and partnered with some of the world’s most coveted manufacturers.

“We’re excited to partner with this world-class team on their mission to help brands take back control of their supply chain,” said Serena Williams, founder of Serena Ventures, who also runs her own fashion brand, S By Serena. “I have experienced the exact problem Calico is solving and have rarely come across a business as in tune with the industry’s challenges and limitations as Calico. It’s a category-defining product that will have an outsized impact on retail, and there couldn’t be a more critical time to help them succeed.”

Joining Serena Ventures in the seed round is Maple VC, Inovia Capital, Hyphen Capital, and a group of early Shopify employees. The startup has also garnered investments from leaders at renowned tech companies including Allen Shim, former CFO of Slack, Jeremy Lai, CEO of Italic and Deborah Liu, CEO of Ancestry. The company previously raised pre-seed funding from Forum Ventures. The new round brings Calico’s funding total to date to $2.15 million.

“Supply chains are notoriously slow, fragmented and analog,” said Kathleen Chan, CEO of Calico. “Last year alone demonstrated how fragile supply chains are across the world and how desperately a solution is needed. This new round of investment will help Calico solve these challenges through our platform and factory network. Our partners at Serena Ventures have such deep expertise on the intricacies of brands that their counsel and investment will unlock exponential growth for Calico.”

More information is available at www.calicoai.com.