Duvo raises $15m to give retail teams an AI workforce that goes live in weeks, cutting manual work by 40%

QUICK TAKE

• Built by veteran retail operators, Duvo automates repetitive work across fragmented systems such as SAP, supplier portals, email and spreadsheets – reducing errors and manual tasks.
• Duvo is built for business users, not IT departments: commercial, supply chain and finance teams can brief AI agents in ordinary language and have them running in their real systems within weeks, without a large integration project or writing a line of code.
• The funding, led by Index Ventures, will expand Duvo’s product, grow the team and scale deployments across large retail enterprises, before moving into other operationally complex sectors.

THE DETAILS

Retail, e-commerce and fast-moving consumer goods are incredibly complex industries, with thin margins and thousands of suppliers. Yet many operations still depend on people manually moving data back and forth across a patchwork of tools and third-party portals—systems that are often a decade old and were never designed to fit together. Traditional enterprise software projects can cost millions and require retailers to rip and replace core systems or build complex integrations that take months or years—and often fail. As competition intensifies and margins tighten, retailers who continue relying on these slow, fragile processes risk falling behind those who modernise faster.

Co-founded by industry operators with decades of retail experience, including Tomas Čupr, founder of the European grocery unicorn Rohlik, Duvo is an AI-native automation platform for retail operations that can go live in weeks rather than years and works across the tools retailers already use. Business users describe what they want to achieve in natural language, and Duvo's AI agents execute it end-to-end across systems such as SAP, portals, email, spreadsheets, and modern APIs, with no coding required. In early deployments, this has translated into roughly a 40% reduction in manual work across core retail tasks and processes.

Built specifically for retail operations, Duvo ships with ready-made AI assistants for painful tasks such as weekly margin reviews, activating promotions and price changes, reconciling supplier invoices, assortment optimisation and vendor onboarding. Retailers typically start with one team or country, prove the value within a few weeks, and then roll the same automations out across other markets without a long IT project.

"At Rohlik we saw teams spending hours every day copy-pasting between SAP, supplier portals, email and spreadsheets just to close the books or launch promotions," says Tomas Čupr, Duvo's CEO and Co-Founder. "Across the industry, millions of hours of bottom-up, exception-heavy work remain untouched because traditional IT automation takes years and cannot handle the messy reality of retail systems. Duvo is democratising automation: giving every retail team an AI workforce they can deploy in weeks, not years, to finally eliminate the operational bottlenecks holding them back. With this funding, we're accelerating our product roadmap and bringing assistants to more enterprises worldwide—helping retailers eliminate errors, reclaim time and gain a decisive advantage over competitors still relying on manual processes."

Working with Duvo's agents is similar to briefing trusted human team members. They take on the messy operational work that slows retail teams down, executing full tasks and processes across retailers' existing systems, from decades-old portals to modern tools. They can even place phone calls.

Unlike general-purpose assistants such as Copilot or Gemini, Duvo is built to run retail operations, not just support them from a chat window. Duvo's agents act directly inside a retailer's systems to carry out tasks autonomously, backed by governance, audit trails, security and user management. Every action is visible: managers can see what happened and when, set approval rules once, and trust that assistants will only surface exceptions or decisions that need a human.

As the major AI businesses race to build general-purpose AI, Duvo's success suggests that domain expertise matters as much as technical sophistication. Čupr is joined by Marek Paris as CPTO and Martin Pecha as COO, both of whom have held senior operational roles at Rohlik and know first-hand what it means to wrestle with retail operations. Their view: if you can automate retail—one of the messiest, most fragmented environments there is—you can automate almost anything.

"Many AI companies are building horizontal tools and hoping to find vertical use cases," says Jan Hammer, the partner who led the investment for Index Ventures together with Index's Bastian Hasslinger. "Duvo is doing the opposite—building specifically for the retail sector, drawing on their decades of experience in this highly complex and technologically underserved industry."

Duvo's current team of 15 people is already automating processes in multi-billion-dollar retail and FMCG groups, while paying customers run six-figure annual contracts that are expanding fast. The investment will support Duvo's hiring and product expansion as it scales across the retail sector, with the aim of expanding into other verticals where operational complexity demands resilient automation.