When Ganesh Ramakrishna left IBM in 2013 to co-found Opex Analytics, the goal was to combine operations research and machine learning to help large companies make better supply chain decisions. That business ultimately exited through a series of acquisitions: first to LLamasoft, then to Coupa in a $1.5 billion deal. But Ramakrishna left with unfinished business.
“We were software people wanting to build a software company,” he said on the Decision Intelligence Lab podcast. “What we discovered was it was super hard to build machine learning as software.” Instead, Opex became a services firm. This time, Ramakrishna decided to try again, starting not with services, but with infrastructure.
In 2022, he and a team of former Opex and LLamasoft colleagues launched Lyric, a platform-first startup aiming to remake how supply chain teams approach decision-making. Lyric’s core thesis is that legacy software from incumbents like SAP and Kinaxis cannot keep pace with the complexity and volatility of modern supply chains. To address that, Lyric built what it calls a fully composable, AI-native decision-making platform.
In August, the Sunnyvale, California-based company announced a $43.5 million Series B, bringing its total raised to $67 million. The round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from Primary Venture Partners, VMG Partners, PSP Growth, and others. Insight’s Teddie Wardi, who joined Lyric’s board, said in a statement: “Lyric’s composable, math-first platform finally gives companies the flexibility and intelligence they’ve been looking for.”
A Platform Approach to Supply Chain Decision Intelligence
First among Lyric’s offerings is Lyric Studio, a multi-layered system built for supply chain analysts, planners, and data scientists. The platform includes a data infrastructure layer for ingesting and preparing supply chain data, a catalogue of AI and optimization algorithms, a visual workflow builder, and a no-code application builder for deploying decision apps.
“Our platform allows companies to build AI-powered decision products at a fraction of the time and cost,” said Ramakrishna. “These aren’t just dashboards or reports; they’re real analytical applications.”
The system is designed to be modular. Customers can bring their own models, reuse Lyric’s prebuilt logic, or compose workflows tailored to their business needs. The idea is to give companies the flexibility of a custom solution without the time and cost burden of traditional enterprise implementations.
Lyric says the platform is already in use across nearly 30 global enterprises. One is Mondelēz International, which initially adopted Lyric as a supply chain design tool and quickly expanded its use. “We originally chose Lyric as our next-generation supply chain design platform,” said Natesh Rao, a supply chain executive at Mondelēz. “But within six months, we were using it across many other decisions. Their algorithmic horsepower is exceptional.”
Another customer reportedly gave Lyric two problems that legacy software couldn’t solve. The company delivered working solutions within weeks. More importantly, the client’s internal teams began expanding those solutions, adding new use cases and growing adoption without needing Lyric to intervene.
According to the company, revenue has grown more than 500% since it emerged from stealth 18 months ago. That trajectory helped attract Insight and other backers to the Series B, which will fund product development, an expanded library of reusable algorithms, and scaling of the customer success and onboarding teams.
Ramakrishna says Lyric is investing heavily in agentic AI, but the company’s ambitions go beyond AI features. “We’re fundamentally challenging the idea that you have to buy fixed applications,” he said. “We want to be the hugging face for supply chain”.
Lyric doesn’t position itself as an off-the-shelf application vendor. Instead, the company is betting on a middle path: an extensible platform that allows supply chain professionals to build and maintain the decision software they need, without depending on rigid software releases or one-off projects.
“We’re undoing the application layer,” Ramakrishna said “We want to open up more degrees of freedom to solve business problems.”
