Dave Clark ran Amazon's entire worldwide operations empire, then washed out at Flexport in under a year. Now he's raised $150 million betting that AI agents, not chatbots, are what actually fixes supply chains.
Auger just closed a $50 million Series B. The Bellevue, Washington startup, founded by Clark in 2024, landed the round from Eclipse, with Oak HC/FT returning for a second round. That brings the company's total funding to $150 million in under two years, according to GeekWire, which reported the deal on July 9. That's fast. For a startup barely 18 months removed from its Series A, it's a quick pace of capital even by AI-era standards.
You've heard plenty about AI agents that draft emails or summarize meetings. Auger is chasing something less glamorous and harder: getting software to make the thousands of small operational calls that keep a warehouse, a truck fleet, and a demand forecast in sync, without a human clicking approve on each one.
The product sits on top of a company's existing ERP, warehouse management, transportation management, and demand planning systems rather than replacing them. It pulls that data into one layer, then uses AI agents alongside more traditional optimization models to make routine execution decisions and carry them out. When something falls outside the pattern, it kicks the exception back to a person. That's the entire pitch. Automate the routine, escalate the strange cases, leave the humans for judgment calls.
Auger already counts Meta's Reality Labs division, sports merchandise giant Fanatics, and consumer products maker Kimberly-Clark as customers, and Clark told GeekWire that another eight to ten companies are in pilots or contract negotiations. The company has grown to roughly 130 employees. Those are production relationships, not press-release logos, and that matters because supply chain software has a brutal habit of dying in pilot purgatory.
The résumé behind the pitch #
Clark's own case for why now is worth taking seriously, because he's one of the few people alive who's run this at true scale. He spent 23 years at Amazon, eventually leading its worldwide operations and then its entire worldwide consumer business, the unit responsible for essentially everything that gets ordered, stocked, and shipped. He left in 2022 and took the CEO job at Flexport. That lasted less than a year. According to Fortune's reporting on Auger's $100 million Series A in October 2024, Clark moved back to the Seattle area, partly to draw on the region's logistics and cloud talent, and launched Auger with his wife, Leigh Anne Clark, who runs the company's fashion and beauty division as co-founder and president.
His argument, as he's put it, is that general-purpose AI wasn't built for the level of expertise supply chain execution actually requires. That's a pointed line, and it's aimed squarely at the wave of startups slapping a chat interface on a logistics dashboard and calling it transformation. Auger isn't selling insight. It's selling execution.
A different kind of AI bet #
Here's the thing that makes this round more interesting than the average AI-agent raise. Investors have chased agent pitches relentlessly over the past year, and most of them are thin: a wrapper around a language model, aimed at a task nobody's proven agents can do reliably yet. Supply chain execution is different. It's a domain with decades of structured data, clear rules, and a steep cost of error, exactly the conditions where an agent allowed to act, not just suggest, has a real shot at proving itself. Eclipse and Oak HC/FT aren't betting on a chatbot. They're betting that a guy who spent two decades inside the most operationally intense company on earth knows what a routine warehouse decision actually looks like.
It's also a bet on Clark himself, and that cuts both ways. His Flexport tenure ended messily and fast, and operators with big résumés don't always translate that experience into a startup that survives its own growing pains. Auger's early customer list, spanning retail, consumer goods, and even Meta's hardware division, suggests the product is landing outside Clark's old Amazon orbit. That's the harder test for any operator turned founder: proving the playbook works somewhere your old badge doesn't open doors.
The next stretch will tell the real story. Eight to ten pilots converting into paying contracts would validate the model fast. If they stall instead, Auger becomes another cautionary tale about how hard it is to get enterprises to hand real operational authority to software, however credible the person running it.
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