Singapore's ING Labs spin-out Stemly raises US$2.5m in seed funding

STEMLY, a platform which helps to optimise solutions for supply chain and finance industries, has raised US$2.5 million in seed funding to chart growth.

Investors in the round include the bank's venture arm ING Ventures, venture capital fund Elev8 as well as EDB New Ventures, the corporate venture building arm of EDB.

Stemly, the first initiative to be spun out of ING Singapore's startup incubator, has developed a platform to automate the forecasting as well as optimisation of a company's supply chain and finance processes.

This addresses the gap in planning for demand in manufacturing and retail, since it may take three weeks or more for companies to respond to market changes in consumer behaviour, said Stemly. This lag time typically results in overstocking and loss of sales.

Businesses are often challenged by the uncertainty in supply chains, where demand and supply fluctuations have been amplified by the pandemic, said Sanjay Saini, the co-founder and co-chief executive of Stemly.

He added that Stemly can allow managers to make "better and faster decisions" in demand forecasting, inventory optimisation and cash flow management. This would in turn hopefully "reduce operating costs and improve operational efficiency".

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Giuseppe Manai, Stemly's co-founder and co-chief executive, said that the startup can help businesses save 10 per cent to 40 per cent of their cost of inventory and working capital. "(This is) equivalent to tens of millions of dollars in some cases," he added.

Stemly says it is able to do this through embedding automatic machine learning in their forecasting and optimisation applications. "We have already signed on several leading multinational corporations (MNCs) as clients; with this investment boost, we are confident of growing faster," Mr Manai noted.

Stemly started within ING Labs Singapore with Mr Manai and Mr Saini as founding venture builders, both based in Singapore. Its team of 20 is spread across Singapore, India, Indonesia, Ireland and Australia.

Following the spin-out, Stemly will be an independent entity, and continue to work "closely" with ING, to benefit from its global network and financial services expertise, it said.

Mr Manai has over 20 years of experience in the data science field while Mr Saini has accumulated more than 25 years of global corporate experience in managing, consulting for and developing software for supply chains.