There’s nothing sexy about filing freight claims or digging through inboxes to match a tracking number to a lost pallet, unless you’re into operational masochism. But if you’ve ever sat in the middle of a warehouse watching a logistics team copy-paste tracking info between WMS and ERP systems like it’s still 2005, then you already know the real villain in the supply chain isn’t volatility, it’s manual work. Enter BackOps AI, where logistics gets its own version of a command-line interface for the chaos.
BackOps AI just locked in a $6 million seed round led by Construct Capital, with continued support from Gradient Ventures and 10VC. That brings their total raise to $8 million in under a year. Not bad for a company that isn’t just predicting supply chain bottlenecks, they’re executing on fixing them. Congratulations to Sean McCarthy (Co-founder & CEO) and Henry Ou (Co-founder & CTO), the duo who decided that logistics workflows deserve automation that actually shows up to work.
Sean McCarthy was one of the early hires at Amazon Shipping and saw firsthand how the sausage gets made, and mangled, when siloed systems, ticket queues, and email threads are driving multi-billion-dollar operations. Henry Ou brought the AI muscle from Apple and ByteDance, with a background in distributed machine learning systems that don’t melt the second someone hits “Reply All.” Together, they’ve built Relay, an AI operations platform that doesn’t just observe inefficiencies, it terminates them. Think of it as the quiet operator in the background parsing emails, updating ERPs, triggering WMS tasks, and even handling customer support, all without needing a standing desk or an HR file.
Relay isn’t playing in the shallow end. It’s already integrated across 100+ systems and touching every major point in the workflow chain, WMS, ERP, CRM, and the Slack threads in between. It automates the mundane and the maddening, from reshipments and order updates to multi-system coordination and claims resolution. It’s no code, it’s enterprise-grade, and most importantly, it actually acts. No dashboards collecting dust, no promises of insights with no follow-through, BackOps AI is execution-first, insight-second.
Here’s the business takeaway: BackOps AI didn’t raise money because AI is hot. They raised because logistics is broken in ways the big incumbents keep ignoring. By solving the problem the industry pretends isn’t there, manual workflows, they’ve tapped into a $100 billion inefficiency hiding in plain sight. They’re not disrupting logistics. They’re upgrading it. Quietly, surgically, relentlessly.
This isn’t about funding. It’s about focus. And right now, BackOps AI is the only one in the room asking the right question: Why the hell are we still doing this by hand?
