What Duvo actually sells
Duvo describes itself as giving operations teams an AI workforce rather than a single chatbot or point tool. The pitch, per the company, is that it captures how work actually happens inside an enterprise, finds the specific causes of loss in that workflow, and then automates those processes inside one integrated system. That is a more surgical claim than most agentic AI vendors make, and it comes from a founder who built the thing he is now selling before he tried to sell it.
Tomas Cupr is co-founder and CEO of Duvo and remains founder and group CEO of Rohlik Group, the European online grocer he has run alongside this new venture. Rob Moffat of Balderton Capital, which led the round, said Cupr has founded three companies before this one, Rohlik among them. Duvo is starting with two of the highest-friction, highest-volume back-office processes in retail and CPG: freight audit and invoice audit, the kind of work that is tedious enough to automate and consequential enough that errors compound quickly at scale.
The funding and who is backing it
The 32 million dollar Series A was led by Balderton Capital, with Index Ventures, Northzone, and Credo Ventures all returning as existing investors from an earlier round. That brings Duvo's total funding to 48 million dollars, a meaningful jump in a venture environment where enterprise AI startups are increasingly expected to show revenue traction before raising again, not just a compelling technical demo and a founder with a track record.
The hires accompanying the round say as much about Duvo's ambitions as the capital does. Michael Green joins as SVP of go-to-market from Databricks, after previously serving as an SVP at Salesforce, the kind of enterprise sales pedigree you bring in when you intend to sell into Fortune 500 operations teams rather than SMBs. Spencer Insolia joins as managing director for the US after serving as president of Kmart and a managing director at Accenture, giving Duvo someone who has run a struggling US retailer from the inside. Christoph Schwaiger, former CEO of Aldi South Holdings, joins as senior advisor for Europe.
The case Cupr is making against headcount metrics
Cupr's core argument is that companies have been measuring AI agents by how many people they could replace, and he calls that the wrong unit entirely. His alternative framing is extracting more value from the people a company already employs rather than extracting the same value from fewer of them. That is a notable position for a founder to take publicly in the same week that Kroger announced 3,000 corporate layoffs tied explicitly to its AI strategy, and it puts Duvo's sales pitch in direct tension with how a lot of large retailers are currently justifying AI investment to their boards.
He grounds the argument in his own operating experience at Rohlik, where planners used to manually check roughly eight at-risk products per market each day for potential shortages, a process that by its nature could only ever cover a small, arbitrarily chosen slice of the catalog on any given day. Duvo's platform now checks every signal continuously, around the clock, which is a scope change rather than a speed change. The claim across Duvo's existing customer base is more than 100 million dollars unlocked in total, spanning finance, supply chain, commercial, customer care, marketing, and HR functions.
What the early customer results actually show
The clearest proof point so far comes from Notino, the European online beauty retailer, which used Duvo to automate its quarterly reconciliation of supplier bonuses, a process covering roughly 45 million dollars a year. That reconciliation cycle dropped from 70 days to 15, and the specialist hours required per cycle fell from around 120 to under 10. Those are the kind of numbers that justify a finance team's attention regardless of how the AI underneath is marketed, because they describe a process that used to consume a meaningful chunk of a quarter now compressing into two weeks.
UK grocer Morrisons is also a named customer, with group productivity director Gordon MacPherson framing the engagement less around speed and more around visibility: Duvo helps the company understand business processes that have evolved over decades in enough detail that automation decisions can rest on evidence rather than institutional assumption. That is a slower, less flashy value proposition than a reconciliation-cycle case study, but it is arguably the harder and more durable one, since most large retailers' real bottleneck is not knowing which processes are worth automating in the first place.
Why Balderton thinks this is still hard
Rob Moffat's comment backing the round was notably unvarnished for a venture investor: getting AI agents to work reliably across the enterprise remains incredibly difficult. That is a useful corrective for any CTO currently being pitched agentic automation as a solved problem by a vendor with a slicker demo than track record. Duvo's own positioning implicitly concedes the same point by starting narrow, with two process types in one vertical, rather than promising general-purpose automation across every department on day one.
The decision to start specifically with US retailers and consumer goods companies, rather than Duvo's European base, is also worth noting. Cupr said directly that the company is starting in the US with retailers and CPG companies, which puts Duvo on a collision course with a crowded field of American enterprise automation vendors, but also puts it closer to the capital and the customer base that can fund the next round.
The decision this creates for CTOs
For a retail or CPG technology leader evaluating agentic automation vendors right now, Duvo's pitch is a useful stress test for internal AI narratives either way. If your organization is justifying AI spend purely on headcount reduction, Cupr's argument, and Kroger's layoffs the same week, should at minimum prompt a harder conversation about which framing survives board scrutiny over multiple quarters. If your organization has already decided headcount reduction is the metric that matters, Duvo is simply a competitor to evaluate on its merits rather than a philosophical challenge.
Either way, the Notino and Morrisons results point to where this category of tool is proving itself first: high-volume, rules-heavy back-office reconciliation work with a clear dollar figure attached, not the more ambitious customer-facing agent use cases getting most of the industry's attention. That is a narrower starting point than the marketing suggests, and it is probably the right one for a vendor this early in its life, because a clean dollar-and-days case study travels much further inside a skeptical procurement process than a roadmap slide.
