Automation startup Duvo says it’s ready to provide retail and e-commerce teams with an artificial intelligence agent workforce that handles their day-to-day operations after raising $15 million in seed funding.

Today’s round was led by Index Ventures and saw participation from Credo Ventures, Northzone and Puzzle Ventures, plus angel investors such as Wiz Inc. co-founder Roy Reznik and former Stripe Inc. Chief Technology Officer David Singleton.

Duvo, officially known as Taskcrew Inc., says its platform offers access to ready-made AI agents for retail operations that can automate “painful tasks” such as weekly margin reviews, reconciling supplier invoices, activating promotions and price changes, assortment optimization and vendor onboarding.

With these agents, users simply express what they require them to do, or what they want to achieve, in natural language, and the company says they’ll execute the assigned task across systems including SAP, retail portals, email, Excel and through modern application programming interfaces. Unlike other agentic systems, Duvo caters to business users rather than technical staff, enabling commercial, finance and supply chain teams to create and improve AI agents themselves without waiting for engineering support.

Duvo said most early adopters typically begin with just one team on an experimental basis, but quickly end up rolling out its platform across their entire business, reducing manual work across core retail tasks and processes by around 40% on average. In doing so, it provides companies with a critical edge in the cutthroat retail and e-commerce industries, where competition is so intense that everyone is operating on razor-thin profit margins.

Automation can be a silver bullet for retailers, Duvo believes, because there’s still a lot of cumbersome work that involves using a patchwork of fragmented tools and manually shifting data from one platform to another. Moreover, many of the legacy systems they use were never designed to work together, and that means businesses are forced to build and maintain extremely complex integrations.

Duvo co-founder and Chief Executive Tomas Čupr previously founded the European online grocery unicorn Rohlik, where he witnessed his teams spending hours every day just copy pasting information among SAP, email, spreadsheets and supplier portals to get essential work done.

“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,” he said. “Duvo is democratising automation: giving every retail team an AI workforce they can deploy in weeks, not years, to finally eliminate the operational bottlenecks holding them back.”

According to Čupr, those who collaborate with Duvo’s agents say the experience is similar to briefing a reliable human team member. They can offload the more mundane and time-consuming tasks to trusted agents that will act inside their retail software systems and carry them out fully autonomously. The agents are supported by clear audit trails and every action they perform is visible to guarantee human oversight.

What that means is that operators will be able to see everything the agent has done and understand why it did it. For more sensitive tasks, users can set appropriate approval rules so they’ll be notified when decisions require human judgment.

Duvo, which has already secured a number of retail customers with multibillion-dollar revenue streams, is now aiming to expand its platform globally. “With this funding, we’re accelerating our product roadmap and bringing assistants to more enterprises worldwide,” Čupr said. “We’re helping retailers eliminate errors, reclaim time and gain a decisive advantage over competitors still relying on manual processes.”

Index Ventures’ Jan Hammer said he was impressed by Duvo’s laser focus on solving problems in the retail industry. “It’s building specifically for the retail sector, drawing on its teams’ decades of experience in a highly complex and technologically underserved industry,” he said.

Image: Duvo