Danish retailtech startup Atlo has raised funding from a group of Scandinavian SaaS and fintech founders as it seeks to digitize wholesale operations in the interior and lifestyle sector. Investors in the round include Danny Christensen and Pierre Rindsig, founders of PensoPay, as well as Christoffer Bouet and Lasse Viggo Henriksen, co-founders of Contribe and Reversio. The company is building an AI-based platform intended to streamline communication and ordering between brands and retailers, a process that in much of the wholesale industry is still handled through email, spreadsheets and phone calls. The funding will support further platform development and expansion across the Scandinavian design and interiors market, where Atlo has been working with a group of established brands during the product’s development.
Atlo develops software for wholesale operations in the interior design and lifestyle sectors. The company’s platform uses AI and automation tools to help brands manage retailer communication, inventory visibility, order flow and sales follow-up processes. Founded by former AndLight purchasing executive Casper Brix, Atlo focuses on digitizing workflows that are often still handled manually through email, spreadsheets and phone calls.
Former head of purchasing has teamed up with some of Scandinavia’s leading interior design brands to build an AI-powered wholesale platform. Now the founders behind Pensopay, Contribe and Reversio are investing.
A group of Scandinavia’s most recognized interior design and lifestyle brands have joined forces with Danish startup Atlo to develop a new standard for wholesale. The names behind the brand group will be announced in the coming weeks, but according to Atlo they collectively represent several thousand retailers and millions in annual orders.
At the same time, the company has attracted investors with deep retail-tech experience: Danny Christensen and Pierre Rindsig, founders of the payment solution PensoPay. As well as Christoffer Bouet and Lasse Viggo Hensrik, co-founders of Contribe and Reversio — both SaaS companies in the retail space.
Behind Atlo is Casper Brix, who as former head of purchasing at AndLight — owned by Royal Design Group and Story House Egmont — experienced wholesale from the side of the table that actually decides whether an order gets placed.
“A large part of our time was spent calling brands for basic information: What do you have in stock? What should we prioritize? What’s selling well at our competitors? The information existed — it was just trapped in spreadsheets and inboxes at the brand, and nobody could pull it out for us. So we spent hours on manual outreach to get answers that should have been sitting in a dashboard,” says Casper Brix, CEO and founder of Atlo. “The most expensive part of that situation wasn’t the time spent — it was the orders we never placed because we didn’t know what we were missing. As a retailer you’re sitting with a sale you’re losing, and the brand is sitting with an order they never receive. Both sides lose, but nobody has the overview to see it. That’s exactly what Atlo solves.”
That insight — from the buying side — is rare in B2B SaaS. Most sales software is built by people who have never sat with a purchase order. Atlo is built by someone who has placed thousands of them.
Wholesale accounts for the majority of revenue for most interior design brands. Yet orders, price lists and customer follow-up are typically handled via email, Excel and phone.
The result is visible in the numbers: most brands only activate a fraction of their retailer network in any given season. A brand with 500 retailers might have real dialogue with 50–100 of them. The rest receive a generic price list by email and hear nothing more. Orders that should have been placed never are — not because the product is missing, but because the follow-up is.
For retailers, the consequence is equally concrete. Stores lack products they could have sold, because nobody told them they were available. The brand loses revenue it never discovers. It’s a silent billion-dollar problem hiding between two inboxes.
Atlo was not developed in isolation. The platform was built in close collaboration with a select group of Scandinavia’s leading interior design and lifestyle brands, collectively representing several thousand retailers.
The platform uses AI to identify when a retailer is ready to reorder, automates order flow and follow-up, and gives brands a real-time overview of their sell-in performance — information that today typically only surfaces in a quarterly report, months after the order window has closed.
“Wholesale is one of the last major corners of retail that hasn’t been digitalized. Brands use advanced tech for everything from marketing to logistics, but when it comes to selling into their own retailers, they fall back on email and phone. Atlo solves that with a founder who knows the problem from the inside — from the buyer’s chair, not the seller’s,” says Christoffer Bouet, co-founder of Contribe and Reversio.
Atlo’s ambition is to build the leading global platform for wholesale in the interior and design industry. Starting from Scandinavia, where some of the world’s strongest design brands originate, the goal is to create the infrastructure that connects brands and retailers across markets — and eliminate the wasted effort and lost revenue that currently defines the wholesale process across the entire industry.
Click to read more funding news.
Read the orginal article: https://arcticstartup.com/atlo-raises-funding/
