New York start-up Optimal Dynamics has raised a $18.4m series A round to build the decision layer of logistics and supply chain management. This is less than a year from its $4m seed round.

The investment will allow Optimal Dynamics to more than triple its current 25 person operation, with a strong focus on R&D and expanding sales and marketing efforts. In addition, it will give the company the resources to drive development efforts for new products in the logistics and supply chain industry.

This industry is no stranger to significant complexities and uncertainty in daily operations and planning; the transportation buyer and logistics operator bear most of these extra costs and inefficiencies, while the end consumer has been largely unaffected. However, over the past year, Covid-19 and the rampant growth and demand from ecommerce caused disruptions in the supply chain that even consumers noticed, forcing logistics operators to take a much more forward-thinking view on how they make operational and strategic decisions.

As a by-product of nearly 40 years of research and development at Princeton University led by Optimal Dynamics co-founder Warren Powell, the company is pioneering a class of decision intelligence tools, deployed through its SaaS product, Core.ai. This moves beyond the familiar uses of artificial intelligence – image and voice recognition, pattern identification and so on – to the world of using computers to make high-dimensional decisions in complex environments, especially amid uncertainty.

In addition to driving automation of daily decisions, these tools have shown their ability to provide millions of dollars of savings to users.

“Sold primarily to truckload operations today, Core.ai leverages high dimensional artificial intelligence to allow companies to capture significantly more detail, plan into the future and, most importantly, manage uncertainty,” said Daniel Powell, co-founder and CEO of Optimal Dynamics. “This is the breakthrough that allows our platform to go beyond just providing statistics on a screen, but driving decision automation and intelligence.”

During the research and development period, the underlying technology was deployed, tested and iterated on countless times during engagements with some of the largest trucking companies, railroads and energy companies in the world, along with projects in health, ecommerce, finance and materials science. This relationship with industry, where university software was tested in production, allowed the Optimal Dynamics team to witness first-hand the problems faced by industry and the limitations of existing theory.

Core.ai’s high-dimensional artificial intelligence is made possible by a novel use of approximate dynamic programming developed specifically for freight transportation, transitioning the logistics industry from real-time human decision-making to automated decision-making at every level. It enables logistics companies to automate everything from high-level strategic questions around how many drivers they need or what equipment they should buy, to daily dispatching and load acceptance.

Its ability to learn from and plan for uncertainty also allows companies to plan significantly further into the future, a departure from previous systems that had to assume a perfect future. This makes it possible to perform strategic (what-if simulation), tactical (one to 15 days into the future) and real-time planning, all with the same technology, breaking down the barriers between planning and execution.

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), alongside returning investors Fusion Fund, Westly Group, TenOneTen Ventures, Embark Ventures, FitzGate Ventures, and industry veterans John Larkin and John Hess.

“Bessemer is excited to partner with Optimal Dynamics to help drive their continued expansion,” said Mike Droesch, partner at BVP. “Logistics operators need to consider a staggering number of variables, making this an ideal application for a SaaS product that can help operators make more informed decisions by leveraging Optimal Dynamics’ industry leading technology. We were really impressed with the combination of their deep technology and the commercial impact that Optimal Dynamics is already delivering to their customers. We look forward to helping them continue to build the future layer of supply chain intelligence.”

BVP is an early-stage venture capital firm with a portfolio of more than 200 companies. The firm has 130 IPOs, including Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, Skype, LifeLock, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, MindBody and Fiverr. Investors and partners are positioned all over the world in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, Tel Aviv, Bangalore and Beijing.