Supply chains have had a tumultuous few years, beginning in 2020, when COVID-19 upended legacy global supply chains. More recently, the “TikTok-ification” of retail has companies like Shein and Temu creating new products constantly as consumer demands change at the same rapid pace.
Pendulum aims to help companies better plan for supply and demand in this new on-demand economy.
Pendulum’s software connects all of a company’s fragmented internal data sources, like inventory, procurement, and pricing, into one AI-powered model that is meant to help companies predict and optimize their supply and demand.
Co-founder and CEO Benjamin Fels told TechCrunch that getting supply and demand right helps companies not only improve their margins but also reduce waste. “The single most powerful thing you can do as a retailer to become more sustainable is absolutely nail supply versus demand,” Fels said. “If you know everything you make somebody wants, you are going to dramatically decarbonize your operations, and you are going to increase at massive scale your margins.”
Fels originally got the idea for Pendulum after he spent years on the derivatives trading floor and oversaw teams building AI-enabled prediction products for supply and demand on the financial side. Fels said he wondered if that same approach would also work for supply and demand in the supply chain world.
He launched Macro-Eyes in June 2013 alongside Suvrit Sra at MIT to find out. The pair spent years doing research and development around this concept. When the company was ready to commercialize and raise institutional capital in 2023, they rebranded to Pendulum.
Pendulum now works with enterprises across retail, healthcare, and national defense. Victoria Secret-owned Adore Me and the U.S. Department of Defense are customers.
Pendulum is announcing a $22 million funding round that includes $11 million of non-dilutive capital, for research and development, and $11 million in venture capital from firms including: Lowercarbon Capital, Cross Border Impact Ventures and Decisive Point, among others. Fels said the company plans to use the funding to help the company get to scale with a core set of customers, continue to grow its customer base, and improve its product.
In addition to the funding news, Pendulum also announced that Jean-François Gagné, the co-founder of Element AI — which was acquired by ServiceNow in 2020 for $230 million — is joining the company as the chief strategy and product officer.
“I realized that JF not only had this insight on bringing AI to the enterprise, but also this rich history across supply chain and across a lot of these fundamental optimization problems,” Fels said. “After multiple three-hour straight conversations, it just clicked that JF needed to lead the product vision, and needed to lead strategy around how we take this to scale.”
Supply chain tech has become a hot category ever since the pandemic shined a light on how fragility of existing global supply chains. Fels thinks that Pendulum stands out because its algorithmic approach was built on a decade of research and development.
“People have been trying to optimize supply chains for 5,000 years,” Fels said. “Over the last two or three years, the volatility and the uncertainty both around supply and around demand, has just hit every retailer, every organization that’s exposed to supply chain, with tremendous force. We felt that really required a different kind of response.”
