Kodiak Hub, a Stockholm-based platform that helps businesses manage relationships with suppliers, announced today it raised $6 million in new funding from Oxx to expand its operations into the United States.

Kodiak’s platform provides a cloud-based, artificial intelligence-powered supplier relationship management solution for strategic buyers and their teams to help them secure quality goods while optimizing their supply chain efficiency.

“If you think about what a customer relationship management system is for an account executive, that’s what we are for a strategic buyer,” Malin Schmidt, founder and chief executive of Kodiak Hub, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “So, we don’t focus on the operational, for example, ordering. It’s really where do we decide to place our billions of dollars when we make these large industrial buying decisions of stuff that goes straight into production.”

Schmidt said that unlike legacy systems that can be rigid, Kodiak is designed to be user-friendly and plug-and-play, making its integrations fast and easy. Many strategic buyers are looking for a quick time to value and don’t want a long wait. Having a platform that can come online quickly is a must.

Under the hood, Kodiak uses AI to produce supplier profiles enriched from multiple sources, including web scraping and direct supplier input, to verify and validate the information. The end result is that customers can trust the data they’re basing decisions on. The company’s AI also provides insights into a supplier’s likely future performance, helping customers identify risks to make informed decisions.

Kodiak has more than 250,000 suppliers across more than 20 industries actively managed on the platform and said that its AI-powered system can reduce supplier onboarding time by 80% while improving supplier engagement by 90%. With the assistance of the AI providing profiles and automating SRM tasks, it can save about 10 hours per week, the company said.

The company focuses on industries with complex, risky supply chains such as manufacturing, process industry, energy and food production.

“The old truth was that in the middle of a trade war, the fewer the suppliers the better, but that’s not working when tariffs are changing day by day,” said Schmidt.

Instead, companies need a broader ecosystem of alternatives and the ability to switch quickly. This creates a complex network of contacts and “homework” that companies need to do to stay on top of what suppliers have the best possible capabilities and performance for them to procure the goods that they need. Engaging and collaborating with that supplier network, and the regulatory landscape that comes with it has become a complex web that is difficult to navigate.

Kodiak Hub currently operates in Europe, but with this new funding round, Schmidt said Kodiak intends to expand into the U.S. and help American companies build more resilient, sustainable supply chains. That’s important as they face growing pressure from regulatory changes, tariffs and increasing demands for supply chain transparency.

Schmidt explained that although most procurement platforms focus solely on cost and efficiency, Kodiak’s holistic approach and AI-powered data-driven insights for U.S.-based companies on supplier performance will empower them to make smarter, more responsible buying decisions.

Image: Kodiak Hub