Atomic, a Boston-based supply chain software startup founded by former Tesla employees, has raised $12.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by growth equity firm Klass Capital and Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group. The new funding brings Atomic's total raised to just over $15 million. The company also announced that longtime Tesla planning director Jeff Goodrich has joined as chief technology officer and third co-founder.
Atomic's software determines how much inventory a company should hold and where it should be kept, simulating scenarios and then recommending or automatically selecting a response. The founders built an early version of the system at Tesla during the 2018 Model 3 production ramp, when the automaker's spreadsheets could not keep pace with planning changes. According to Jon McNeill, a former Tesla president and founder of DVx Ventures, where Atomic was incubated, the company's annual recurring revenue has quintupled since the start of this year.
McNeill, who sits on Atomic's board, said the company has moved from pilot customers to what he called real, DoorDash-scale customers. He said the product has evolved from an optimization platform that offers recommendations into one that makes decisions, describing it as fully autonomous. DoorDash, he said, is running roughly 90 percent of its purchasing across hundreds of sites through the system. For food-focused customers like DoorDash, the software helps reduce waste and spoilage.
CEO Michael Rossiter said supply chain and operating model decisions amount to an infinite search space that is constantly changing, and that AI can find the best paths through that forest. He said Atomic's model is general enough to adapt to different systems, and that the company is working with consumer packaged goods clients while going deep with mobility and manufacturing customers, returning to its Tesla roots. Rossiter said making the agentic software useful across multiple industries drew investor interest, as did Atomic's ability to deploy quickly.
McNeill said the board challenged the company to compress onboarding time and make turning the product on a non-event for customers. Chief product officer Neal Suidan led that effort, McNeill said, pushing the agentic AI to infer a customer's decision rules even when they had not been written down. Customers then told Atomic it might as well make the decisions and free up their time, he said. McNeill added that executives understood decision speed as an advantage, a principle he said he learned at Tesla.
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