A former Oxford physicist who once hunted magnetic monopoles has now raised $11 million to hand critical supply chain decisions over to artificial intelligence. Her London startup, Intropy, doesn’t just recommend what spare parts to stock or how to price them: it acts, autonomously executing those moves directly inside a customer’s enterprise software without a human ever clicking “approve.”
This matters because the global spare parts industry, valued at $1,134.8 million, still runs largely on spreadsheets and fragmented legacy systems. As manufacturers, distributors, and recyclers grapple with thousands of SKUs across multiple warehouses, the margin for error grows thin. Meanwhile, investment in autonomous AI agents continues to accelerate, with the market projected to leap from roughly $8 billion in 2025 to over $52 billion by 2030.
Felix Capital led the seed round. Quiet Capital and General Catalyst also participated, marking General Catalyst’s second investment in the company after backing its pre-seed stage alongside firstminute capital in 2024.
CEO Franziska Kirschner co-founded Intropy in 2024 with CTO YihKai Teh. Kirschner left her PhD program at Oxford, where her research on superconductors appeared in Nature, to build what she calls “an AI-native operating system.” Teh, formerly an AI academic at University College London, brings deep technical expertise from Malaysia. The pair met at Tractable, the London-based insurance AI firm. There, Kirschner led AI and product while Teh worked as a researcher. Together they hold more than 10 patents related to computer vision and vehicle damage assessment, a foundation they now apply to the opaque world of spare parts.
Intropy’s platform sets itself apart by eliminating the dashboard layer entirely. It plugs into a company’s ERP system and manages pricing, stocking, and obsolescence decisions at machine speed. When data signals a component is becoming obsolete, the software can adjust its price and reposition inventory automatically. The company reports handling over $10 billion in parts demand since launch, with customers routinely seeing returns exceeding 10x their investment.
The fresh capital will expand engineering and machine learning teams, open a New York office as the firm’s first US location, and deepen its European footprint. Kirschner stands among the few female CEOs in deep-tech industrial AI. As the wider market floods with general procurement automation tools, Intropy’s hyper-focused niche on spare parts presents a sharper bet. The real test ahead: whether an industry built on manual controls will cede authority to an invisible intelligence that simply gets on with the job.
