Optilogic founder and CEO Donald Hicks recognized that the world was quickly changing, and the supply chain industry needed to change with it. With decades of experience, Hicks is best known for founding Llamasoft, a supply chain modeling, optimization, and analytics solution in 1998, which later sold for $1.5 billion. Leveraging that success, he founded Optilogic with a singular vision: to redefine the principles of supply chain design by enabling all people of any organization to realize the benefits of greater enterprise design through their software.

The team at Optilogic consists of supply chain design experts who set out to build the fastest, most powerful supply chain network design platform on the planet. Today, Optilogic is a global company across the U.S., Canada, and United Kingdom and has helped hundreds of organizations across manufacturing, retail, distribution, and transportation and logistics industries solve their toughests supply chain challenges. 

Addressing a rapidly-changing world’s supply chain needs 


One hundred percent SaaS-based, the Cosmic Frog solution helps organizations move away from chaotic spreadsheets and making decisions off “gut feel” to using real data to drive results. Optilogic is the only design solution that provides a risk rating on every scenario, so customers can make more information decisions beyond just cost. Cosmic Frog network optimization runs 40% faster than competitor solutions, is accessible from anywhere, and uses hyperscaling technology to allow hundreds of models and scenarios to run in parallel on enterprise-scale computing resources. 


The Cosmic Frog Solution

Optilogic

Optilogic is a supply chain network design software company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Optilogic offers cloud-native supply chain network design solutions that enable businesses to evaluate trade-offs across financial performance, service levels, and systemic risk to design resilient supply chains even in the most dynamic, challenging environments. Beringea U.S. invested in Optilogic in 2023, co-leading an investment aimed at accelerating research and development of the company’s supply chain network design software platform. 

After spending two decades working in a variety of settings across the healthcare and insurance industries, Authenticx founder and CEO Amy Brown saw firsthand the often-missed opportunity that healthcare organizations held with their internal data.  As the COO of an insurance company, she knew that operations departments housed customer interaction records that could help grow revenue and improve profitability by elevating the voice of the customer. The challenge: there was no systematic way to pull that information together in a  meaningful way for all parts of the healthcare enterprise. In 2018, she founded Authenticx to use AI and natural language processing to discern insights from the recorded customer interactions that are already occurring – calls, emails, or chats – and reveal important information for all parts of the healthcare enterprise, enabling them to make better business decisions.

Helping humans understand humans


The platform is a multi-user, multi-tenant application that enables clients to perform activities in three different business domains: Compliance, Quality, and Marketing Insights. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing technology, Authenticx leverages conversational intelligence to enable a robust platform that draws meaning from unstructured data to answer questions, provide quality service, or enhance customer support. The Authenticx platform utilizes transcription, rule-based classification, and machine learning models built specifically for healthcare. Authenticx makes it possible to combine existing customer interactions across call center data, texts, chats, emails and more into a single source of truth. The platform can categorize and tag existing data to give it structure. Less time organizing the data means more time to uncover hidden feedback and enables users to share actionable, multi-sensory insights across the organization. 

A platform leveraging conversational intelligence

Driven to provide the best conversational intelligence product, the company added new features to its robust platform, including the Eddy Effect Dashboard and a quality management solution. The Eddy Effect Dashboard combats the complexity of healthcare with actionable feedback in a single performance analytics dashboard by tracking impactful metrics across the organization to eliminate waste and improve customer outcomes. The dashboard enables customer experience teams to listen at scale to unsolicited feedback, identify obstacles impeding the customer journey and provide teams with the insights to tell data-backed stories and improve CX. 

Authenticx’s quality management solution empowers organizations to auto-score contact center conversations, identify areas of improvement and opportunity, reduce agent onboarding time, increase efficiency and deliver better CX.

Evolving solutions designed to improve customer outcomes and increase efficiency 


Authenticx

Authenticx is the new standard for humanizing conversational intelligence in healthcare by analyzing millions of customer interactions (like voice, chat, or emails) to surface immersive and intelligent insights at scale. Beringea U.S. invested in Authenticx in 2023 as part of a $20 million Series B funding round with plans to use the capital infusion to further innovate in machine learning and product engineering, fuel sales and marketing efforts, and continue to expand the business. 

Rush ReCommerce’s co-founders started Hayneedle 20 years ago, pioneering the online selling of home furnishings. During that time, they experienced the challenge returns present for retailers, customers, and especially manufacturers. The team sought an alternative to allowing customers to “just keep” the item or receiving products back in unsellable condition on the way to a landfill. This solution didn’t exist, so they started Rush ReCommerce to provide an end-to-end returns solution specifically for the home furnishings industry. Since then, Rush has developed sophisticated recommerce software to receive, process, and price returns to maximize profitability and created Rush Market, an in-person and online off-price marketplace.

Finding a sustainable solution.


Rush ReCommerce offers an eco-friendly solution to handle ecommerce returns of all sizes through their Returns by Rush™ service.  The program offers an end-to-end solution to process e-commerce returns and maximize recovery using their proprietary network, software, and resale technology. Ecommerce returns are routed from the customer to Rush’s recommerce centers where proprietary software is used to digitize and resell products. The result is a higher recovery rate for partners and an innovative way to solve the problem of small parcel and oversized returns.


Maximize recovery, minimize costs, solve returns.


As of 2022, Rush ReCommerce has processed more than 225,000 products with a retail value of $60 million and has helped save more than five million pounds of products from landfills. With its multi-faceted approach to tackle this ever-growing problem, the company's mission is to turn the negative aspects of returns into positives for retailers, suppliers, customers, and the environment. Rush ReCommerce is currently working with 150 manufacturers and brands to handle their online return volume.

Circular Economy.

Rush ReCommerce

Rush ReCommerce is an end-to-end solution for home goods ecommerce returns and excess products based in Omaha, Neb. Most bulky returned home goods end up in warehouses and ultimately disposed of due to high shipping and processing costs. With Rush ReCommerce’s solution, products are returned to Rush and processed with specialized software that evaluates products for greater recovery rates. The company is also pioneering resale of open box home goods online, through its flagship marketplace The Rush Market. Beringea U.S. invested in Rush ReCommerce in 2022, leading a $12.9 million Series A funding round aimed at enhancing its solution and accelerating the growth of its recommerce network.

Five years after its launch, Lucky Saint is the U.K.'s leading independent non-alcoholic beer brand and is available in over 5,000 pubs, bars, and restaurants, as well as major retailers. The B Corp-certified company has seen a 180% year-on-year revenue sales growth since its establishment and has contributed to the increase in participation in Dry January, which noted more than 10 million participants this year.

Creating a shift in the U.K. drinking culture.

With one in three pub visits not involving alcohol consumption, Lucky Saint’s latest raise will allow them to reach even more consumers in the U.K. and to serve superior lager in their own pub and 'brand home' that is due to open in March. The fundraise, which is the largest ever by an alcohol-free brand in Europe, will also let them establish a presence around the continent.

Building a category leader in the U.K. and internationally. 

Lucky Saint

Lucky Saint is an independent alcohol-free beer and is part of the Beringea U.K. portfolio. Founded in 2018 by Luke Boase, who was inspired to begin brewing his own alcohol-free beer after having struggled to find any high-quality low- or no-alcohol beers on offer in the U.K. After months of travelling and 60,000 litres of beer brewed, Lucky Saint was born.  

CreativeX uses a variety of technologies to analyze creative assets and express its insights into the performance and brand compliance of these assets through data. Data is then passed back to the companies for them to tailor and improve their creative content. The platform has helped leading global brands such as Google, Facebook, Nestle, and PepsiCo measure their visual marketing assets. 

Helping brands to measure creativity.

Beringea actively seeks to back female founders and address the fact that only 9% of equity funding in the UK goes to female-led businesses – Anastasia Leng reflects the growing cohort of female founders that we invest in. She started her first entrepreneurial venture, Hatch, following a five-year stint at Google where she worked on nearly every adtech and analytics. Anastasia launched CreativeX in 2015 and to date, she has fundraised close to $30m for her business.

Backing exceptional founders.

CreativeX

Part of the Beringea U.K. portfolio, CreativeX is an AI-powered creative analytics platform used by global brands to measure the efficiency, consistency and impact of marketing and advertising content. Anastasia Leng founded the SaaS company in 2015, and its technology has helped thousands of marketers truly understand their creative content. 

Following Beringea's initial investment - leading Papier's Series B in 2019 - the stationery brand successfully secured $50m in Series C funding from Singular and DMG Ventures in January 2022. The funds will be used to strengthen Papier's expansion in the US. To date, the business has raised a total of $65m.

Raising for success.

The e-commerce company has embarked on a sustainable journey by introducing paper packaging for their products that is made of recyclable materials, and is also re-usable. Another change that they've made to reduce their footprint is using only sustainably sourced paper. Last but not least, all of Papier's products are, and have always been, produced on a made-to-order basis, leading to less waste. 

Thinking about our future.

Papier

Papier is a direct-to-consumer personalised stationery brand that has been part of the Beringea U.K. portfolio for three years. Since its founding in 2015 by Taymoor Atighetchi, the company has rapidly grown, reaching a point where it now employs more than 100 staff members in London. The company's most recent milestone in its scale-up journey has been establishing its first international office in New York. 

Modern material science has created ultra-hard materials, but existing manufacturing processes are not suited to cut materials of this strength with the extreme precision required for advanced applications. Micro-LAM has developed a patented laser-assisted diamond cutting tool system that seamlessly bolts on to existing CNC machining manufacturing infrastructure worldwide. Laser-assisting the diamond cutting tool is the key to the Micro-LAM manufacturing process, as the laser softens and heats the target material at the exact moment that the diamond cutting tool comes in contact with the surface, allowing a level of precision that is unparalleled in the industry.

Extreme precision.

Micro-LAM was spun-off in 2012 from Western Michigan University’s College of Engineering. In 2018, Micro-LAM CEO and founder Dr. Deepak Ravindra set a growth strategy for his ultra-precision laser-based technology which included vertical integration, growth in consumables and acquisition plans. Since then, the company has founded M10 Edge diamond tool manufacturing company, launched OPTIMUS T2 product with capabilities of diamond turning glass, formed a wholly owned subsidiary in the UK that makes a specific component of its system, acquired 603OPTX, Inc., an optical fabrication company, and installed over 78 systems.

Growth strategy.

In 2019, Dr. Ravindra found an acquisition target in the high-precision optics manufacturing segment of the market offering strong, synergistic potential with Micro-LAM’s proprietary ultra-precision machining. Then, in 2020, Ravindra faced a new challenge when the COVID-19 pandemic froze customers’ capital expenditure budgets. The company could have sat on its cash, but Dr. Ravindra chose to pursue building capabilities on other synergistic platforms, and so far, he says, “that’s been the right decision.”

Synergistic potential. 

Micro-LAM

Micro-LAM's state-of-the-art retrofittable system equips precision machines with a hybrid laser-diamond cutting system.  This system is used to efficiently machine materials that are difficult to cut, such as ceramics, silicon, glass and hard metals, thus creating extremely high-quality optics and precision components. In 2020, Beringea U.S. participated in the $5.5 million Series B round and joined the Micro-LAM board of directors.