Duvo, an automation startup that’s trying to fix how retail and e-commerce teams handle their daily grind, just raised $15 million in seed funding. The round was led by Index Ventures, with backing from Credo Ventures, Northzone, Puzzle Ventures, and some notable angel investors including Wiz co-founder Roy Reznik and former Stripe CTO David Singleton.
The company, which goes by the official name Taskcrew Inc., is betting that retail teams are tired of spending their days copy-pasting data between systems and manually reconciling invoices. Their solution? AI agents that actually do the work instead of just offering suggestions about it.
These aren’t chatbots that answer questions. Duvo’s AI agents handle real operational tasks—weekly margin reviews, reconciling supplier invoices, activating promotions and price changes, optimizing product assortments, onboarding new vendors. Users tell the agents what they need in plain language, and the AI goes off and executes those tasks across whatever systems the company uses: SAP, retail portals, email, Excel, modern APIs, you name it.
No Engineering Degree Required
Here’s what makes Duvo different from a lot of other AI automation tools: it’s built for business users, not technical staff. That means people working in commercial teams, finance, or supply chain can set up and improve these AI agents themselves without having to wait weeks for the IT department to get around to it.
That’s kind of a big deal in retail, where business needs change fast and engineering resources are usually stretched across a million other priorities. According to Duvo, companies that start experimenting with one team typically end up rolling the platform out across their entire operation pretty quickly. The company claims it reduces manual work on core retail tasks by about 40% on average.
In an industry where everyone’s operating on razor-thin profit margins and competing on price, speed, and efficiency, a 40% reduction in busywork isn’t just convenient—it can actually move the needle on profitability.
Built by Someone Who Lived the Problem
Duvo’s CEO and co-founder, Tomas Čupr, isn’t some tech entrepreneur who decided retail seemed like a good market to disrupt. He previously founded Rohlik, a European online grocery company that became a unicorn. While building that business, he watched his teams waste hours every single day just moving information between SAP, email, spreadsheets, and supplier portals.
“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,” Čupr said. His pitch is pretty straightforward: Duvo gives retail teams an AI workforce they can actually deploy in weeks, not years, cutting through the operational bottlenecks that have been slowing them down forever.
The people using Duvo’s agents say it feels like briefing a reliable coworker. You hand off the tedious, repetitive stuff to an agent that works autonomously inside your retail software and just gets it done. The agents keep clear audit trails, so you can always see what they did and why they did it. For tasks that need human judgment, you can set up approval workflows so you get notified before the AI makes any big moves.
That mix of autonomy and oversight seems designed to address the nervousness a lot of companies feel about letting AI loose on critical operations. Nobody wants their pricing system going haywire because an agent made a bad call.
Early Traction and What’s Next
Duvo has already signed up retail customers pulling in multibillion-dollar revenues, though they’re not naming names yet. With this $15 million in the bank, Čupr said they’re accelerating their product development and expanding globally. “We’re helping retailers eliminate errors, reclaim time and gain a decisive advantage over competitors still relying on manual processes,” he explained.
Jan Hammer from Index Ventures said what convinced him was Duvo’s laser focus on solving actual problems in retail rather than building generic automation tools. “It’s building specifically for the retail sector, drawing on its teams’ decades of experience in a highly complex and technologically underserved industry,” he noted.
Whether Duvo can deliver on the promise to transform retail operations at scale is still an open question. Building AI agents that can handle messy, exception-filled workflows across fragmented legacy systems is harder than it sounds. But with retail teams drowning in manual work and $15 million from serious investors backing the idea, Duvo’s got a real shot at proving that AI agents can do more than just chat—they can actually run parts of your business.