Former Amazon executive Dave Clark raised $100 million for AI supply chain startup Auger

Now Clark is using his lifetime of experience and lessons learned from a short, tumultuous time at the helm of supply chain startup Flexport to bet on himself.

Clark founded a new AI-powered supply chain startup called Auger this summer and raised $100 million in Series A funding entirely from investment firm Oak HC/FT, he said Assets in an interview on Monday. Clark's goal is to help mid-sized companies with global supply chains – think the Fortune 500 outside the top 50 – integrate different supply chain systems and their data from different providers into a single operating system that is more like a consumer app than like a clunky device looks corporate solution.

“The software doesn’t really communicate with each other; “A friend of mine calls it Franken software,” Clark said of traditional supply chain systems. “All the pieces come together but don’t work together, and so people end up putting teams of analysts together using Excel.” A shocking portion of the world’s supply chain actually runs on Excel.”

With Auger, Clark aims to enable business users to get real-time answers to pressing questions about shipments, forecasting and other critical areas through simple text queries. Such transparency should help increase the efficiency of a supply chain while reducing costs, Clark believes.

“How do we enable companies to operate their supply chains with the same level of simplicity and elegance as the consumer applications they use every day?” asked Clark rhetorically. “The technology to do this is totally there, but I think it just hasn’t been put together yet.”

Clark said the optimal solution for an Auger customer will be companies that have global supply chains but are not so large that they employ huge internal technology departments. The startup will likely focus its efforts on U.S.-based companies initially, but hopes to eventually expand beyond that, including into the government and defense sectors.

Clark moved from Texas back to Washington state to start Auger, which is headquartered in Bellevue. According to a spokesman, the startup plans to grow to 30 to 40 employees in the next six months. Auger hasn't released a product yet, and Clark hasn't decided which AI model or models the startup would use.

Clark spent 23 years at Amazon and retired from the company in 2022 as CEO of its global consumer business, reporting to Amazon CEO Bezos and later his successor Jassy. Clark spent nearly a decade of his time at Amazon in roles more or less equivalent to a chief supply chain officer, where he launched and scaled Amazon's last-mile delivery network and laid the foundation for a new regional warehouse structure, according to the Company has helped increase shipping speeds.

Clark left Amazon to take the CEO job at freight software startup Flexport, partly due to friction with Jassy, ​​his new boss. But Clark spent just a year at the startup before Flexport founder Ryan Petersen ousted him and his deputies in a dramatic, confusing move.

Clark, who said he has not spoken to Petersen or Jassy recently, has reportedly been considering a run for governor of Texas in 2026. But he said it Assets that he had decided not to throw his hat in the ring after Gov. Greg Abbott announced earlier this year that he planned to run for re-election. “He's a great governor,” Clark said of Abbott, although he noted that he hoped to eventually enter politics, in part because of his disillusionment with career politicians.

“Many of the problems we're talking about today, whether immigration or anything else, are highly solvable problems where rational people on both sides probably have 80% or 90% of the same goals and can't get the ball across the finish line, because he is just too good.” “They have to fight politically for their careers,” he said. “I think if there's a world where politicians… that's not their career… there's a higher likelihood of solving some of these persistent problems that continue to exist and are causing a lot of dysfunction in the world.”

As for Auger, Clark said he has a vision of tackling a similar problem at Flexport as he is now tackling at his own startup.

“I went to Flexport with the idea that we could build the same things we built at Amazon, but for other companies,” Clark said. “And that was kind of the intention when I went there, but in the end we weren't aligned in the same way on the mission.”

Now he gets a second chance. With a war chest of $100 million behind them.