Plato closes $14.5M to bring AI automation to wholesale trade

Plato, a Berlin-based startup, has raised $14.5 million in seed funding to bring generative AI into wholesale distribution, a massive industry that rarely makes tech headlines but quietly moves a significant share of the world’s goods.

The round was led by Atomico, with Cherry Ventures, Discovery Ventures, and D11Z joining in.

Wholesale distribution accounts for roughly one-fifth of global production flows. Yet much of it still runs on aging ERP systems, Excel spreadsheets, and manual quoting workflows that haven’t meaningfully evolved in years.

While AI has flooded marketing, customer support, and coding, distribution sales teams are often still copy-pasting numbers between systems.

Plato’s thesis is simple: instead of adding another dashboard, embed AI directly into the operational core. The company connects to existing ERP systems and turns historical sales data into automated actions, flagging revenue opportunities, generating quotes, and identifying risks before they surface in quarterly reports.

The idea grew out of lived frustration. Co-founder Benedikt Nolte experienced the inefficiencies firsthand in his family’s distribution business. Generic CRM tools, he concluded, weren’t designed for the complexity of distributor operations. Plato was built specifically for that environment, not retrofitted from SaaS templates designed for startups.

Early traction suggests the industry is paying attention. Plato reportedly works with several large distributors on six-figure contracts, a sign that AI adoption in traditional sectors is less about hype and more about whether it can save time and unlock revenue.

The fresh capital will help Plato expand beyond sales intelligence into areas like procurement and customer service automation, while pushing into new European markets and eventually the U.S.

More broadly, the round highlights a shift in AI investing. The next wave isn’t just about bigger language models; it’s about embedding intelligence into industries that haven’t been rewritten by software yet. Wholesale distribution may not be glamorous, but it is structurally essential. If AI can modernize that layer of the economy, the impact will be far larger than another chatbot demo.