Smoothing Supply Chains: Why We Invested in Silkline
The upheaval of legacy software incumbents by AI-native companies is underway. Origin Ventures VI’s latest investment, Silkline, is AI-native procurement software for advanced manufacturers that accelerates supply chain teams in the request for quote (RFQ) to purchase order (PO) process. Origin Ventures VI led a $4M seed financing alongside Forward Deployed VC and returning investors Barrel Ventures, Matchstick, and 25 Madison.
Legacy supply chain software forces suppliers into clunky portals just to submit a quote. Many juggle over a dozen logins, waste hours on training, credential resets, and system quirks. The experience is so painful that countless suppliers have abandoned portals altogether— resorting instead to emailed PDFs. In diligence, we learned that trillion-dollar companies source hundreds of millions of dollars of materials through email, despite paying for “modern” supply chain systems. The PDFs induce misery for procurement teams that have to manually parse the information.
Silkline’s approach is dramatically different. With Silkline, suppliers don’t need new accounts, portals, or training— they can keep emailing quotes exactly as they do today. Silkline’s AI parses the unstructured data in email and attachments and translates the morass into a structured understanding of the unit price, lead time, quality, provenance, and many other factors. Procurement uses this apples-to-apples comparison across quotes, to deliver faster, smarter decisions. Seamless ERP integration ensures procurement and finance stay in sync, eliminating the manual double-entry that slows down teams.
The backdrop for Silkline’s rise could not be stronger. Supply chain shocks from COVID, tariffs, and geopolitics have exposed fragility, while industries like aerospace, defense, and advanced manufacturing (Silkline’s initial target industries) face rising demand, compressed lead times, and desire for hard-to-acquire exotic materials. Procurement teams need speed and clarity, not clogged inboxes, manual work, and outdated portals.
Silkline’s growth is fueled by a powerful network effect: about 20% of new customers first encountered the product as suppliers themselves, receiving an RFQ generated by Silkline. Experiencing its simplicity firsthand, they adopted Silkline for their own procurement. This product-led growth initiative caught our attention in a world where selling costs for software are under scrutiny.
The company has also been remarkably capital efficient, achieving with just four world-class builders— alumni of SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir—what bloated incumbents cannot.
We are thrilled to partner with co-founders Isaac and Brent as they reinvent global supply chains with Silkline.
