Our investment in Plato: building the AI operating system for global distribution
TLDR
- Atomico led Plato’s $14.5M Seed to bring AI-native sales intelligence and quoting to wholesale distributors on top of existing ERPs.
Key Takeaways
- Wholesale distribution is a $3 trillion global industry where ERP systems act as static records; sales teams work reactively with no AI support.
- Plato integrates with existing ERPs to give field and inside sales teams proactive recommendations on customer risk, upsell opportunities, and quoting.
- Customers report up to 15% revenue uplift, hours saved weekly via automated quoting, and up to 10x higher sales efficiency.
- Founders Benedikt Nolte, Matthias Heinrich Morales, and Oliver Birch built the first version inside Benedikt’s own family distribution business.
- Cherry Ventures doubled down; Discovery Ventures and Dieter Schwarz’s D11Z also participated in the round.
Why It Matters
- Distribution sits between every manufacturer and retailer, yet its core software has not evolved beyond passive record-keeping, leaving revenue on the table.
- Plato’s ERP-layer approach avoids rip-and-replace risk, which is the main adoption barrier in enterprise distribution software.
- The platform’s expansion roadmap covers customer service and procurement after sales, targeting full workflow orchestration across the business.
Atomico · 2026-02-19 · Read the original
