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-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.”