Berlin-based Plato has raised $14.5 million in a seed funding round led by Atomico. The investment, which included participation from Cherry Ventures and D11Z (the investment arm of Lidl founder Dieter Schwarz), will fuel the international expansion of what the founders describe as an “AI-native operating system for wholesale.”
The big picture: The global trading industry is a $3 trillion market still largely running on legacy ERP systems and manual spreadsheets. Plato addresses the resulting labor shortages and thin margins by deploying agentic AI that unlocks hidden ERP data, transforming reactive sales teams into proactive, data-driven sellers.
How it works:
- Sales Intelligence: Automatically identifies cross-selling opportunities and churn risks from thousands of customer signals.
- Workflow Automation: Streamlines the creation of quotes and orders directly within the ERP, saving employees an average of five hours per week.
- Proactive Copilot: Provides a 360-degree view of customer needs, allowing field and inside sales teams to operate with tenfold higher efficiency.
The catch: While Plato’s practice-driven origin—founded by Benedikt Nolte to save his family’s wholesale business—gives it a “right to win” in domain expertise, the startup faces a significant integration hurdle. B2B distribution is a landscape of highly customized, often archaic ERP setups where “plug-and-play” is rarely a reality. As Plato scales beyond its initial European base, it must prove its agentic AI can maintain its reported 90% software margins while navigating the expensive, bespoke engineering work typically required to bridge modern AI with legacy industrial software. Furthermore, as seen in the broader agentic supply chain sector, Plato must ensure its automated quotes don’t lead to “algorithmic drift” where pricing strategies become detached from the real-world, high-touch relationships that still define wholesale trading.
Key Details
- Funding: $14.5M (Seed)
- Lead: Atomico
- CEO: Benedikt Nolte
- Sector: Wholesale Tech / ERP Automation
