Ula co-founder raises $10m to reimagine the back office with AI

After shutting down B2B ecommerce startup Ula in late 2023, co-founder and former CEO Nipun Mehra is back with a new venture.

His latest startup, Neoflo.ai, has launched with a US$10 million seed round from Lightspeed India, Peak XV, and Alter Global.

The inspiration to build Neoflo came to Mehra in mid-2023, when he attended an AI workshop hosted by Young Presidents’ Organization.

Nipun Mehra, co-founder of Ula, speaking at the Tech in Asia Conference 2022 / Photo credit: Tech in Asia

“For the first time, I fully realized how powerful AI had become and could immediately see commercial applications of it,” he recalls in an interview with Tech in Asia.

Mehra adds that he “never really quite made a business” out of his education until building Neoflo, which he says has been in the works for the past six to seven months.

The company positions itself as an AI-first business process outsourcing (BPO) platform that makes the back office more efficient. Instead of selling software or supplying teams of workers, it aims to deliver completed work by blending AI and human expertise.

AI-powered back office

A recent MIT report found that 95% of AI pilots fail to deliver return on investment. Meanwhile, 70% of AI budgets are funneled into sales and marketing, even as the back office quietly consumes 40% of operating costs.

Neoflo aims to tackle this concern, starting with functions like finance, procurement, and operations.

Specifically, the company caters to businesses that lack in-house AI expertise but run high-volume, repetitive processes. The pitch is simple: Send Neoflo the work – like invoicing – and it will show up correctly in customers’ enterprise resource planning software.

“In the back, there will be some part which the AI will do, and some part which finance people will do,” Mehra explains.

Mehra shut down Ula in 2023, even with US$140m in funding and backing from Jeff Bezos’ family office. / Photo credit: Ula

He emphasizes that Neoflo is not another AI tool, but a service that owns service-level agreements and returns completed tasks at agreed quality levels and cost.

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