HappyRobot has closed a $44 million Series B round, less than a year after raising its Series A. The San Francisco-based startup, which is automating how work gets done in the supply chain, is betting big on the idea that AI workers can take on the messy, repetitive, and often overwhelming operational tasks that bog down human teams.
The new capital, led by Base10 Partners with participation from a16z, YC, and new investors including Tokio Marine and World Innovation Lab, will go toward scaling product engineering, deployments, and go-to-market functions. The company expects to surpass 100 employees by the end of the year, a stark climb from a five-person team just after its Series A.
The company has quickly gained traction in a sector often criticized for being slow to adopt new technology. The momentum, according to co-founder and CEO Pablo Palafox, came from customers themselves.
“A few months ago, we didn’t need to raise,” Palafox said. “But we saw tremendous pull from customers. They wanted us to grow our go-to-market and engineering teams and expand the product lines we were building. This wasn’t just about scaling; the demand is there to build AI solutions right now.”
HappyRobot’s platform deploys AI “workers” that can hold conversations over the phone, email, and chat; parse documents; browse websites; and log data directly into enterprise systems. Unlike generic copilots or chatbots, these agents are designed for frontline execution, negotiating rates, scheduling appointments, collecting payments, or following up on loads.
By offloading these repetitive tasks, customers report dramatic returns: resolution times cut from a week to less than 30 minutes, collections exceeding 119 times their initial investment and carrier sales operations delivering returns north of fivefold.
Palafox sees the role of AI not as replacing people but as rebalancing teams.“Humans aren’t great at aggregating massive amounts of data, but they’re very good at judgment and relationships. Our AI is there to surface exceptions and insights, like spotting a late shipment, and then letting people make the call. Once that decision is made, the AI worker takes over again. It’s about freeing people to do the work they actually want to do.”
Supply chain technology has a reputation for slow movement, but competitive pressure is changing the pace. “Executives are seeing competitors save millions by adopting AI,” Palafox explained. “That creates urgency. It signals this isn’t just another wave, it’s a tangible transformation.”
HappyRobot has built its platform with enterprise demands in mind, controlling its own infrastructure and AI models to ensure reliability and scalability. Each deployment is supported by a forward-deployed engineer, a model Palafox describes as essential to accelerating time-to-value for customers who need systems to work out of the box. “Enterprises don’t just want a vendor, they want an AI partner,” he said. “They trust us because we’ve built with them in mind from the start.”
Beyond task automation, the company is working toward what Palafox calls a “digital twin” of enterprise operations, a living, real-time representation of the business where AI agents can make proactive decisions. That vision, combined with tools like the AI Auditor for compliance and the AI Builder for customizable deployments, points to a future where organizations coordinate entire operations through AI teams.
The ethos behind the rapid growth is simple but compelling. As Palafox puts it, “If there’s something you don’t like, automate it. Let AI unlock what humans do best. Our mission is to take away the mundane and repetitive, so people can focus on what actually drives value.”
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