Lyric’s $43.5M Series B Fuels Bid to Replace Legacy Supply Chain Tools

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-