Retail, e-commerce, and fast-moving consumer goods industries face complex operational challenges, including low profit margins, thousands of suppliers, and reliance on manual data entry across fragmented legacy systems and portals. Duvo, a Prague- and New York–based startup, provides an AI-driven automation platform designed specifically for retail operations.
Its platform seamlessly integrates with retailers’ existing SAP, email, portal, and spreadsheet tools, automating repetitive tasks without coding or large IT projects. Duvo’s AI agents handle end-to-end workflows, reducing manual work by up to 40%.
Today, Duvo has raised $15 million in seed funding, led by Index Ventures, with participation from Credo Ventures, Northzone, Puzzle Ventures, and angels including Roy Reznik (Wiz), David Singleton (former Stripe CTO) and Kieran Flanagan (former Zapier CMO).
“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,” says Tomas Čupr, Duvo’s CEO and co-founder.
Fixing retail work that still depends on manual tasks
Duvo was co-founded by Tomas Čupr, the founder of European grocery unicorn Rohlik, together with Marek Paris (CPTO) and Martin Pecha (COO), to democratise automation in retail by giving commercial, supply chain, and finance teams an AI workforce deployable in weeks to eliminate manual bottlenecks that slow operations.
Tomas Čupr was inspired by the inefficiencies he witnessed at Rohlik, where teams spent hours daily copying data between disparate systems to complete routine tasks. He says, “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. 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.”
Unlike general-purpose or traditional RPA tools, Duvo’s AI agents autonomously execute tasks inside retailers’ real systems, with built-in governance, audit trails, comprehensive security, user management, and human-in-the-loop approvals. Business users describe their needs in plain language, while IT maintains control through guardrails.
Founders tell TFN, “Duvo’s platform uses AI agents that work directly inside a retailer’s operational systems. Business users describe a task in plain language, and the agent executes that task across old portals, modern APIs, email, spreadsheets and ERP systems. It is built to be operated by commercial, supply chain and finance teams rather than IT departments.”
This rapid, no-code setup enables deployment in weeks rather than months or years, empowering non-technical teams to create and refine their own AI assistants without engineering support. Duvo also offers pre-built AI agents for standard retail functions, including margin reviews, promotions, invoice reconciliation, assortment optimisation, and vendor onboarding.
Competitors like UiPath offer broad automation suites but often require more technical skills and longer implementation times, highlighting Duvo’s advantage in usability and its retail focus.
Founders add, “We tend to compete with the systems retailers already have in place, whether that’s RPA platforms, SAP’s own automation tools, generic workflow builders or simply large consulting projects trying to stitch legacy systems together. The problem is that none of those options handle the messy, end-to-end operational work that slows teams down. Duvo is built precisely for that reality. Our agents work directly across SAP, portals, email and spreadsheets, and business teams can deploy them in weeks rather than years. That’s the gap we fill and why retailers come to us once the limits of traditional automation become obvious.”
What’s next?
With its current team of 15 and six-figure contracts at multi-billion-dollar retail and FMCG enterprises, Duvo plans to use its new funding primarily to hire, accelerate its product roadmap, and scale deployments worldwide. The company aims to deepen its retail footprint while exploring expansion into other operationally complex sectors where resilient automation can deliver significant ROI.
Founders conclude, “We’re focused on deepening the product, growing the team and scaling across major retail groups globally. As we prove the model in retail, we also plan to move into other sectors where operational complexity creates the same need for resilient automation.”
“Many AI companies are building horizontal tools and hoping to find vertical use cases. 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,” says Jan Hammer, the partner who led the investment for Index Ventures together with Index’s Bastian Hasslinger.
TFN reached out to Duvo to comment on the team’s diversity.
