A Denver-based startup has secured funding to develop an artificial intelligence-based platform that automates data entry for quoting and buying.
BoltWise Inc. was formerly known as BoltUp and launched last year in Delaware.
The company landed $3 million in a seed funding round, according to a company’s a company filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission submitted July 25.
The investment round was led by Denver-based Range Ventures and suppoerted by New York City-based Bienville Capital, Denver-based SpringTime Ventures, Menlo Park, California-based Sarah Smith Fund and Golden-based Service Provider Capital.
A third of the round, $1 million, came last year as pre-seed funding. The pre-seed was led by Bienville Capital, but due to it being a simple agreement for future equity, the pre-seed was included on their form D filing, the company said in a written statement. SAFE agreements allow investors to invest capital in a start up without determining its value, making the investment well-suited for pre-seed rounds.
BoltWise is currently building software designed to streamline the sale of fasteners and hardware by providing an AI-powered catalog of item number, description and quantity so that sales reps can give customers AI-generated quotes in minutes, according to the company’s website.
Cole Weiler, CEO and co-founder of BoltWise, previously worked as a procurement expert for McKinsey & Company where he said he led teams that helped fortune 500 companies procure goods ranging from “critical parts going on military aircraft to pens needed around the office.”
But he said the trickiest orders were for fasteners or maintenance, repair and operations goods — things like safety equipment and belts. “These parts are so tricky because for most categories you're buying maybe 200-1000 unique parts. For fasteners, companies could easily be buying more than 10,000 unique parts that can be as cheap as fractions of a cent,” he said.
Weiler said that when ChatGPT was released, he realized the new technology could help ease the categorization and quoting process, giving sales reps more time to focus on other aspects of the procurement process.
BoltWise is looking to expand their team of four and bring on another engineer, he said.
The startup aims to change how people in industrial distribution think about what the sales and procurement process has to look like, Weiler said.
“Alongside an incredible group of early customers and design partners we were able to build a product that is already allowing these companies to move quicker, but we have a long list of features and capabilities we're excited to go build," he said.
