- Duvo raised $32 million in a Series A financing round led by Balderton, just 10 months after its $15 million seed round.
- Tomáš Čupr, the founder, thinks that AI should be used to make employees more productive rather than merely reducing jobs.
- Gartner forecasts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027.
For a while, Tomáš Čupr measured AI by how many people it could replace. He now calls that “the wrong unit.” His startup Duvo has raised a $32M Series A, led by Balderton Capital, to prove there is a better one.
Index Ventures, Northzone, and Credo Ventures, which had previously invested, also took part. The company’s total funding is now $48 million, and Tech Funding News covered the $15 million seed round in December 2025.
The funds will enable Duvo to enter the US market, starting with retailers and consumer goods producers.
Čupr said, “We’re starting in the U.S. with retailers and consumer goods companies, because that’s the work we know best. But the processes we start with, like freight and invoice audit, aren’t unique to retail.”
A founder who changed his focus from cutting jobs
Čupr founded the Czech online grocer Rohlik in 2014, attaining unicorn status in 2021 after raising €100 million in its Series C round at a valuation of €1 billion, and he raised $170 million in 2024. Before that, he founded Slevomat and Dáme jídlo, the latter of which Delivery Hero acquired in 2014.
Čupr founded Duvo with Marek Paris and Martin Pecha, former colleagues from Rohlik. When Duvo launched in December 2025, he noticed that employees hired for their expertise were spending a lot of time on manual data entry. To use the company as a testing ground for Duvo, he kept his position at Rohlik.
His current view of AI’s value is influenced by his time at Rohlik.
“For a while I measured AI in heads, counting how many people an agent could replace. It’s the wrong unit. At Rohlik, the gains I’d point to came from work nobody had the hours for. Our planners used to check about eight at-risk products a day per market for shortages. Now every signal gets checked, around the clock. We think of it as raising the GDP of every employee: more value from the people a company has, not the same value from fewer of them,” said Čupr.
This represents a shift in strategy. Initially, Duvo focused on reducing manual work by as much as 40%, but now there is evidence supporting their new method. A Gartner survey of 350 executives from companies earning at least $1 billion in revenue found that firms that achieved better results from AI and automation reduced staff at a rate similar to those that achieved lower or negative results.
Tackling the problem of stalled AI pilot projects
Gartner forecasts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs. Spending on business orchestration and automation platforms is expected to increase from almost $7 billion in 2025 to more than $21 billion by 2029.
Duvo presents its product as an Enterprise Execution OS, enabling new processes to run through shared connections, approval rules, and result tracking rather than as separate projects. The implementation process starts with Duvo Clarity, which identifies workflows through AI-powered interviews, screen recordings, and document analysis.
Duvo’s agents carry out the approved steps across ERPs, supplier portals, spreadsheets, and inboxes, using APIs whenever possible and resorting to user interfaces when they are not available. Duvo sends decisions and exceptions to the relevant owners. The company states that initial processes can be put into operation within weeks without extensive engineering resources.
For example, Duvo states that Notino, an online beauty retailer, reduced the time it took to carry out its quarterly reconciliation of approximately $45 million worth of annual supplier bonuses from 70 days to 15. The number of hours that specialists spent on each cycle fell from about 120 to less than 10. Other customers are Morrisons, Holland & Barrett, Boden, and Allegro.
Duvo has several well-known competitors. UiPath, which is listed on the NYSE, began by focusing on robotic process automation before expanding into agentic automation. Celonis, a process-mining company based in Munich, is said to have a market value of $13 billion following its Series D funding.
Duvo distinguishes itself by mapping out processes and allocating ownership for each exception, a method based on the founder’s direct experience. However, this strategy is by no means unique. For example, Valon in the United States raised $150 million at a $2.3 billion valuation using a comparable approach.
What the investors are buying
Balderton’s case rests on Čupr’s track record.
Rob Moffat, a partner at Balderton, said, “Getting AI agents to work reliably across the enterprise remains incredibly difficult. Duvo’s unique ability is in how it uses AI to capture how work actually happens in the enterprise and what the causes of loss are. Duvo then automates these processes in the same integrated system. This is only possible with the deep operational experience of the founder Tomáš who previously founded three companies including Rohlik, the leading online grocer.”
“It is still extremely difficult to get AI agents to function reliably throughout the enterprise,” Rob Moffat, a partner at Balderton Capital, said. “The key strength of Duvo lies in the way it uses AI to identify how work really takes place in the enterprise and to determine the causes of losses; it then automates these processes within the same integrated system. This kind of achievement is due to the extensive operational experience of the founder, Tomáš, who had previously set up three companies, one of them being Rohlik, the leading online grocer. Feedback from customers and consultancy partners is incredibly positive. We are looking forward to supporting Tomáš and his team as they build what will become the global leader in this area.”
Some questions remain without answers. Duvo has not made its valuation, revenue, or annual recurring revenue public. The company states that it has unlocked more than $100 million for clients in sectors such as finance, supply chain, commercial, customer care, marketing, and HR, but this reflects value provided to customers.
The team has expanded from 15 people at the seed stage to nearly 60.
