Stemly

Stemly is a Singapore-headquartered software company that automates forecasting and optimisation across a company's supply chain and finance processes. Its core product predicts demand for customers' products sold through e-commerce, distributors and retail channels such as supermarkets, giving clients guidance on how much inventory to hold so they are neither over- nor under-stocked. The forecasting capability is also applied to prices, volumes and revenue; the company has, for example, worked on predicting volatile commodity prices and then deriving how much inventory to buy given an expected price range.

The company positions its work as combining supply chain domain knowledge with data science. Co-founder and CEO Sanjay Saini, who previously held supply chain roles at software firms, has described the approach as identifying the drivers of change in a business — price, promotions, rainfall, weather, footfall — and encoding them so a machine learning model can use them. Co-founder and COO Giuseppe Manai, a data scientist, has said each customer's business complexity must be reflected when configuring a prediction model, rather than solving only part of the planning problem. Stemly's supply chain optimisation solution is intended to support decision-making under uncertainty, such as during the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As of mid-2021 the company had a team of 20 spread across Singapore, India, Indonesia, Ireland and Australia.

Founding story

Stemly originated in ING Singapore's startup incubator programme, ING Labs Singapore, in 2018, and was spun out as an independent company. In late 2020 it began seeking investors and onboarding customers. It was co-founded by Sanjay Saini, chief executive, and Giuseppe Manai, chief operating officer.

Business model

Stemly sells its supply chain forecasting software to enterprises on a subscription basis.

Subscription fees from business customers for access to forecasting and optimisation software.

Traction

As of November 2022 Stemly had five customers, some with multiple projects, and said it was in proposal and negotiation stages with additional prospects, targeting seven or eight more customers. Management estimated profitability was two to three years away and would require eight to 10 additional customers.

Latest developments

In late 2022 the company said it aimed to raise about US$8 million in a Series A round, expected to fund it for two to three years, and to roughly double its customer base by early 2023. The CEO also stated an aspiration to pursue an initial public offering in five to six years, with the location undecided, noting that reaching US$100 million in annual recurring revenue would require global expansion.