This week, Opply announced a $7.5 million round led by Chalfen Ventures, with Index Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, In This Together and Ventures Together joining us. Anthemis is proud to be back alongside Helen Murphy and Martin Postel, more than four years after we first backed them at Seed.
Every product on a shelf is the visible end of a long chain of decisions nobody sees: which supplier, to what specification, in what quantity, by when, and who pays whom in the meantime. Large consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies employ whole teams to run that chain. Emerging brands, which is where much of the most interesting innovation in food and drink begins, run it from spreadsheets, inboxes and the founder’s phone, and it quietly consumes the time and cash they need to build the brand itself.
That was the problem Opply set out to solve when we backed the team in 2022.
The first version of Opply was a marketplace connecting small food and drink brands with quality suppliers through automated sourcing and ordering. Early customers saved an average of two months on sourcing and 20% on costs. It was a sharp wedge into a very large market: the team estimated that SME consumer brands spend around $1.4 trillion a year on the cost of goods. What excited us was what the wedge could unlock: proprietary data on suppliers, pricing and demand; a supplier network that no single brand could replicate; and, because Opply sits in the flow of every order, a natural place to embed payments and financing.
That is precisely what the company has gone on to build. Opply Brain is a system of specialised AI agents that finds suppliers, places and tracks purchase orders, checks compliance documents and pays suppliers on a brand’s behalf, while giving brands longer payment terms and a higher credit limit. Plenty of software tells operators what to do. Opply, as Helen puts it, “does the work,” and still asks for approval before it spends a brand’s money.
This is why the investment sits so naturally with how we think at Anthemis. The most valuable financial infrastructure is often the kind that disappears into a workflow: powerful, intuitive and invisible. When procurement, payments and working capital are handled in one place, by agents that understand abrand’s demand, supplier performance and cash position at the same time, credit becomes a feature of operations rather than a separate product to apply for. That is embedded finance at its most useful, and a category we expect to look very different in the age of AI agents.
The results are showing up in the numbers. Opply reports that gross revenue grew 15-fold over the past 12 months, and that its US business, launched in Chicago in 2025, has grown 30-fold in the last year. Customers including UK drinks brand Agua de Madre and US kombucha brand RMBR have seen results such as cost reductions of 40% and a 12-fold return on investment within a year.
Behind it is a rare pairing. Helen has spent more than a decade in consumer goods, at P&G and Bain and in her own consumer business and has lived this problem from the buyer’s chair. Martin, Opply’s CTO, holds a PhD from ETH Zurich focused on applied AI and brings deep expertise in machine learning and supply chain optimisation. They founded Opply through Entrepreneurs First, which is also back in this round, and have taken it from a marketplace to an AI-native operating system and merchant of record for CPG brands.
Our view is that CPG rewards depth over breadth: a proprietary supplier network, category-specific data and an integrated financing model are hard to bolt on later. We’re excited to back the team as they continue to move upmarket, from emerging brands to major global manufacturers who will want margin visibility, audit trails and a clear answer on how credit is funded..
We are thrilled to continue backing Helen, Martin and the whole Opply team as they expand across the UK, US and beyond, and bring the model to everyone from ambitious emerging brands to major global players.
