- Intropy, based in London, has secured $11 million in seed funding. Felix Capital led the round, and General Catalyst invested again after previously backing the company.
- Intropy’s AI recommends pricing and stocking decisions for spare parts and can also execute them directly in a customer’s ERP system without human oversight.
- Co-founder and CEO Franziska Kirschner left her physics PhD program at Oxford to join an industry worth $1,134.8 million that still relies mostly on spreadsheets.
While at Oxford, Franziska Kirschner studied superconductors and magnetic monopoles, and her research was published in Nature. Now, her AI helps determine which inventory warehouses need, like brake pads, and acts on those decisions without requiring human approval.
Intropy, the London startup she co-founded, has raised $11 million in seed funding. Felix Capital led the round, with Quiet Capital and General Catalyst also investing. General Catalyst first backed Intropy at the pre-seed stage with firstminute capital in 2024.
Kirschner and YihKai Teh founded Intropy in 2024 to provide AI software for spare parts distributors, manufacturers, and recyclers. Many in the industry still rely on spreadsheets and legacy systems for inventory decisions. Kirschner is the CEO, and Teh, who is from Malaysia and was an AI academic at University College London, is the CTO. The company is based in London.
Kirschner and Teh met while working at Tractable, a London AI company focused on insurance. Kirschner led AI and product, while Teh was a researcher. Together, they hold over 10 patents for the use of computer vision and AI in vehicle damage assessment, experience they now bring to the spare parts industry.
“We are not interested in adding another dashboard on top of that complexity. We are building an AI-native operating system that can make and execute decisions autonomously, at scale and speed,” Kirschner says.
AI that acts
Intropy stands out from typical inventory dashboards because it can make and carry out decisions, not just suggest them. The platform connects directly to a customer’s ERP system and manages pricing, stocking, and obsolescence on its own, without manual approval. For example, if data shows a part is becoming obsolete, Intropy can automatically change the price and move stock as needed.
“Every machine made from multiple components will eventually need spare parts, whether it is a car on the road today, an autonomous vehicle of tomorrow or a robot supporting humanity on Mars. Our goal is to make that complexity invisible, with intelligence working quietly in the background. The best user experience is when the user needs to do nothing at all,” Teh adds.
For example, Stockholm’s Kovant raised €1.5 million to automate procurement and supply chains. Intropy is targeting the specific challenges of spare parts management, where fragmented ERPs and manual SKU reviews create a unique opportunity compared to broader automation tools.
Intropy’s focus on autonomous action fits with a major investment trend for 2026. Tech Funding News has seen many new startups using autonomous AI agents in legal, finance, and operations. The global AI agents market is expected to grow from about $8 billion in 2025 to over $52 billion by 2030.
Intropy says its technology has handled over $10 billion in parts demand since launch, and customers have seen returns on investment exceeding 10x. The new funding will help grow its engineering and machine learning teams, open a New York office as its first US location, and support further growth in Europe.
A crowded software market, but a more focused niche
Felix Capital has quickly invested in several founder-led AI companies this year, including leading Polysense’s $10.7 million seed round for AI in food production. Partner Fabian Burnett Small described the Intropy investment in similar terms.
“Every product is designed with components, or spare parts, yet the systems managing those parts remain remarkably manual and fragmented. Intropy is building the intelligence layer that can make supply chains faster, smarter and significantly more efficient — ultimately bringing a better product faster into the hands of the end user. We were immediately impressed by Fran and YihKai’s technical depth, domain expertise and ambition,” Burnett Small says.
Kirschner is one of the few female CEOs in industrial and deep-tech AI, a field where most founders are men. Spare parts are still crucial for every car, machine, and piece of infrastructure. With Intropy’s new funding, the big question for this hands-on industry is whether businesses will switch to autonomous AI systems or keep using spreadsheets.
