Heliux, a startup building an AI-powered enterprise operating system, is emerging from stealth today with the announcement of its first $2M funding round.
Participants in the round include New Stack Ventures, Amplify (LA), Crosscut Ventures, Lux Capital, Countdown Capital, and strategic angel investors.
Heliux 101: The SF-based company was founded in early 2023 by Alex Craig, the former head of supply chain at Relativity, and Victor Jakubiuk, the former cofounder and CTO of AI startup OnSpectra.
Craig said working with product management software for 10+ years gave him a clear view of the problems plaguing existing systems, including a clunky business model that included third-party resellers and a fragmented system that relied on multiple systems not designed to work together. Heliux is his bid to address those challenges.
Heliux AI: Craig described their platform as an “AI-powered, all-in-one operating system” that can keep track of everything from supply chain to quality control to finance. Potential customers include companies in industries such as space, defense, robotics, and clean energy.
“We’re removing the barrier to entry for early stage companies in terms of cost,” Craig said. “By the time you realize you need one of these systems, you have to wait six to 12 months to implement it. We can implement it in a matter of weeks.”
The platform is different from others on the market in a few ways:
- Instead of different solutions for different business areas, Heliux is building an all-in-one platform.
- The startup handles its own distribution and deployment, rather than working with a third-party. “We always will,” Craig said.
- The platform uses AI to automate menial tasks, which Craig calls a “major differentiator.”
Supplier onboarding is one way AI can ease the burden on companies. AI can prepopulate forms for new suppliers with basic information, cutting a lot of busy work for employees, said Jakubiuk. But the bigger goals include using AI to generate custom enterprise resource planning systems for each customer in days instead of months.
What’s next: Customers are already using the first version of the product. A second version of the system is in the works, though Craig declined to give more details.